


This is What You’re Gonna Become: season 9 as the culmination of Dean Winchester’s thematic roles of identity in SPN

by amonitrate



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Child Abuse, Coercion, Incest, Meta, Parentification, Physical Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexual Assault, Sexual Coercion, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Torture, gendered slurs, tags/warnings for discussion of canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 21:37:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11495241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/amonitrate
Summary: Believe it or not this started off as a simple meta on the Mark of Cain, but quickly became Dean Winchester: This Is Your Life.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Unfinished long meta, posted because I think there are still interesting things here. Probably overly complicated conceptually, but there was something complex going on I was trying to articulate.
> 
> I never did get to the part about the Mark of Cain though.
> 
> originally written in 2014. thank you to veneredirimmel for beta reading, and also credit to the Supernatural Wiki for transcripts!

> Repeated trauma in adult life erodes the structures of the personality already formed, but repeated trauma in childhood forms and deforms the personality. The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with formidable tasks of adaptation. She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, power in a situation of helplessness. Unable to care for or protect herself, she must compensate for the failures of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal, an immature system of psychological defenses.

_–Trauma and Recovery_ , Judith Herman

I’ve started off this long essay with the quote from Judith Herman for a reason: it underpins all of my work here, and I believe strongly that there is no way to understand Dean in season 9 without understanding this point.

Believe it or not this started off as a simple meta on the Mark of Cain, but quickly became Dean Winchester: This Is Your Life. I’ve been joking it’s my phd thesis for reasons that will become obvious. But I hope it will be worth it.

 

———————————————————————

INTRODUCTION

In _Wendigo_ , the second episode of Supernatural, Dean Winchester lays out a personal philosophy that as the seasons go by accrues more and more complex meaning:

> I think [dad] wants us to pick up where he left off. You know, saving people, hunting things. The family business.

A few lines later Dean provides his own psychological underpinnings for this philosophy:

> I figure our family’s so screwed to hell, maybe we can help some others. Makes things a little bit more bearable… I’ll tell you what else helps. Killing as many evil sons of bitches as I possibly can.

So much has happened between _Wendigo_ and the present to heap these earnest lines with layers of complexity, but in them lies the key to how the events of the current season relate to long-running, seemingly separate themes that play out for Dean, how these themes interrelate, and how they are coming to a head in season 9.

While Dean starts out framing the hunting life as the “family business” that his father wants him to continue, in the original iteration of this philosophy it’s clear that for Dean the “saving people” portion of hunting is what gives his life the most personal meaning at the time. Helping people out of situations like the one that destroyed his own family “makes things a little more bearable” for him. Despite his often knee-jerk defense of John in s1, Dean is open about the fact that there might be something about their family that is screwed up, something about his life that is unbearable, and that this unbearableness can be alleviated through what he sees as service to others through hunting. But he also follows that up with the line about killing almost like it’s a side benefit – which as time goes on, starts to take over and becomes more and more primary.

How saving people and hunting (killing) things makes anything bearable for Dean is quite complex. In _Wendigo_ this saving/killing dyad is still straightforward and appears to be something he considers a calling. As the show progresses it becomes clear to the audience (and in fits and starts to Dean himself) that _saving people_ and _hunting things_ is nothing as simple as a calling or a choice, that both involve a complicated mix of coercion, coping mechanisms and conditioned responses to child abuse, all rooted in the original trauma of the fire that killed Dean’s mother.

This dyad, Saving People and Hunting Things, can be directly connected to two of the three major roles Dean was forced into as a child by his father. Through instrumental parentification and neglect, John indoctrinated Dean into his “one job” of what I’ll call Save Sammy, which has obvious parallels with the “saving people” portion of Dean’s motto. Through turning his son into a hunter, John forced Dean into the role I’ll call Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument, which parallels “hunting things.” The third role has to do with the deepest self-concept of an abused child, and is tied to not only these two previous roles/forms of child abuse, but additionally to John’s emotional parentification. Though Dean had no way of articulating the third theme back in the first season beyond labeling his family as screwed to hell, as this essay progresses I believe it will tie everything together. I’ll call this theme 90% Crap.

As season nine has developed it’s become clear to me these three major themes of identity are being explored in Dean’s current character arc, explicitly rooted in the ways he was abused as a child.

Briefly, Dean’s arc in the first part of this season was devoted to the Save Sammy theme. Confronted with Sam’s immanent death but knowing Sam would never agree to angelic possession, Dean okayed Ezekiel’s plan to trick Sam into giving him consent to be used as a vessel, ostensibly so that Ezekiel (later identified as Gadreel) could heal the damage from the trials that was killing him. The roots of Dean’s actions in John Winchester’s acts of parentification and neglect should be obvious by now and have been discussed in this blog and throughout fandom. However in this essay I will address aspects of this that I don’t believe have been drawn out, and which are important to understanding Dean’s psychological state this season.

In _First Born_  (9.11) we saw the the second major theme start to develop: “Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument.” Like the “Save Sammy” theme, this has been a major part of Dean’s character arc since season one and is rooted in John’s putting a gun in Dean’s hand when he was six years old, turning his son into a soldier in John’s war of revenge against the supernatural.

Since _First Born_ aired it’s been clear to me the season intended to pull the Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument theme to the forefront, and _Blade Runners_ (9.16) delivered. However, the way the First Blade was introduced to Dean in that episode – cementing the theme – caught me by surprise. While I’d fully expected that Dean would make himself into a weapon after taking on the Mark of Cain, it didn’t play out the way I expected. And I started to ask myself why Dean’s first use of the First Blade happened the way it did, because the framing around it had a very specific connotation and context I’ll describe later in this essay.

What I hadn’t expected was for _Blade Runners_ to pick up on another of the running themes in Dean’s character arc since the first season, and exploring this third theme ends up tying together “Save Sammy” and “Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument” in ways that illuminate and underline the exact nature of those themes. And conversely, seeing the relationships between the “Save Sammy,” “Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument” and this third theme (“90% Crap”) revealed for me the reason why this third theme has manifested itself in very specific ways that have been an undercurrent throughout the series, something I’d observed the presence of but never fully tied together. In this essay I’ll lay out what I see as the narrative function for these choices in the text.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze these three recurring character themes through major events of the series, explore how they’re interrelated, and finally look at how they are playing out in the current season with a focus on answering my own question about why the key events of _Blade Runners_ happened the way they did.


	2. Chapter 2

SEASON 1

SOMETHING WICKED

_Something Wicked_ (1.18) establishes for the audience a pattern in the Winchester family system which continues in _A Very Supernatural Christmas_ (3.08), _After School Special_ (4.13), and was most recently referenced in _Bad Boys_ (9.07). These episodes portray an extreme form of parentification where John is absent for days to weeks while Dean takes on all of the roles of parent for himself and Sam. While we don’t know when this pattern began, it was clearly routine by the time Dean was nine and continued through Dean’s late teens.

Dr. Lisa M. Hooper of the University of Alabama [describes parentification as follows](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.parentification.ua.edu%2Fwhat-is-parentification.html&t=M2FkMGY5MjM1Y2QzZjE0ZDc3YWIyNWYxMzA4ZTdhNTc3ODQzM2ZmOSxpMnBscWxzbg%3D%3D&b=t%3AjYFgja_o5_j4LSQgd5Jfjg&p=http%3A%2F%2Famonitrate.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F84968640674%2Fthis-is-what-youre-gonna-become-2&m=1):

> **Parentification** is often defined as a type of role reversal, boundary distortion, and inverted hierarchy…in which children or adolescents assume developmentally inappropriate levels of responsibility in the family of origin that go unrecognized, unsupported, and unrewarded…[T]he overarching role of the parentified youth can be described as that of caregiver - caring for others at the expense of caring for self. It is often clinically observed and empirically examined along two dimensions: instrumental parentification and emotional parentification.
> 
>   * **Instrumental parentification** primarily involves completing physical tasks for the family such as taking care of relatives… grocery shopping, paying bills, or ensuring that a younger sibling attends and does well in school.
> 
> 

>   * **Emotional parentification** often involves a child or adolescent taking on the role and responsibilities of confidant, secret keeper, or emotional healer for family members.
> 
> 


The key here is that the responsibility placed on the child is _developmentally inappropriate_ , is a reversal of the roles of parent and child, and comes at the expense of that parentified child’s selfhood.

_Something Wicked_ has widely been discussed in fandom as blatant evidence of John’s parentification and neglect, for obvious reasons. The episode’s flashbacks can be analyzed in terms of the interplay between the more obvious Save Sammy theme – illustrating its roots in the way John left nine year old Dean alone in charge of himself and his brother for at least a few days in an extreme of instrumental parentification – but also the Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument and 90% Crap themes and how these themes work together.

Let’s break things down. First, this exchange as John is preparing to leave his children to go hunt:

> JOHN: Lock the doors, the windows, close the shades. **Most important…**
> 
> YOUNG DEAN: Watch out for Sammy. I know.
> 
> JOHN: All right. If **something tries to bust in**?
> 
> YOUNG DEAN: Shoot first, ask questions later.

Not only do we have “watch out for Sammy” emphasized as the most important detail (complete with comment from Dean that establishes this emphasis is a regular thing), but this is directly paired with the possibility that Dean may have to kill to keep his family (Sam) safe. Unlike the stereotypical exhortation you’d expect from a parent leaving children alone, such as “don’t talk to strangers, don’t let anyone in but me,” John specifically suggests a _thing_ (rather than _person_ ) might violently invade the safety of the motel room and require Dean’s equally violent defense.

We’re back to the saving people (Sam) equals hunting (killing) things equation. As we’ll see in the analysis of _Devil’s Trap_ (1.22), the Save Sammy and Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument roles often go hand in hand, and usually incorporate the 90% Crap role in some way.

Left alone with his little brother for days in a motel room, like any nine year old Dean gets bored and heads to the motel’s arcade to play video games once Sam’s in bed. When he returns he finds the Striga attacking Sam. He aims his shotgun but hesitates, frozen in fear. John arrives, shouting at Dean to get out of the way as he fires and scares off the Striga. John hurries to hug Sam, asking if he’s okay. The expression John turns on Dean is angry and rebuking as he interrogates Dean about what happened. When Dean admits to having left Sam alone, John yells “I told you not to leave this room. I told you not to let him out of your sight!”

I’ve [written ](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Famonitrate.livejournal.com%2F504947.html&t=MDE4ODg1MDFmOGU2MDVlYTA0ZWY1MTliNjM0OWM1OWZkYTc3NWFkMyxpMnBscWxzbg%3D%3D&b=t%3AjYFgja_o5_j4LSQgd5Jfjg&p=http%3A%2F%2Famonitrate.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F84968640674%2Fthis-is-what-youre-gonna-become-2&m=1)previously about this scene and how fandom has approached it in the past. Note that John projects blame onto Dean for his own failure as a parent. John erases his own culpability for the neglect which put his sons in danger – leaving them alone in a motel room in a town where he was hunting a monster that feeds specifically on children, despite the fact that a responsible adult was only a 3 hour drive away – by shifting all of the responsibility onto Dean. John refuses to recognize that nine year old children are not mini-adults, that even an adult would become bored if restricted to a room for days the way Dean has been, that constant vigilance is not something children should expected to be capable of.

John doubles down on the initial instrumental parentification (harmful enough on its own especially in this extreme form) by emotionally abusing Dean in the aftermath of the Striga’s attack. Blaming Dean for what happened is an abusive shirking of his own responsibility – John relieves his own emotional distress at the Striga’s attack and erases his own sense of failure by berating his son.

Dean, being a child, accepts this as his due, and it sticks with him into adulthood:

> DEAN: You know, Dad never spoke about it again, I didn’t ask. But he…ah…he looked at me different, you know? Which was worse. Not that I blame him. He gave me an order and I didn’t listen, I almost got you killed.

Here Dean learns the consequences of “failing” John’s prime directive to watch out for Sammy, the most important thing. Wanting anything for himself, even something as simple as an hour or two of video games, leads to horrific consequences: his brother is nearly killed, his father never looks at him the same. Dean internalizes that his vigilance over Sam’s safety can never rest. That unlike in the majority of cases of instrumental parentification, not just Sam’s everyday well being but his _literal survival_ depends on Dean’s choices.

Something as apparently routine as John leaving Dean in charge while he hunts is not as simple as it appears on the surface. Instead when John leaves he frames Dean’s responsibility as not just babysitting on steroids (which seems to be the general fandom conception of parentification), but as a potential life or death situation. Paired with Dean’s original trauma, witnessing his mother’s death in a fire which his father has told him happened due to a supernatural _thing_ _’s_ murderous invasion of the safety of the family home, Dean’s conditioned duty to Sam becomes more than just the effect of instrumental parentification alone. It becomes about trauma, about avoiding at all costs a repeat of the initial destruction of his family. “Watch out for Sammy” isn’t just about who gets the last of the Lucky Charms, it’s about being ready with a shotgun in case a monster breaks down the door.

So Sam’s survival is framed as dependent on Dean’s ability to kill, even as a child. It isn’t just Dean’s supposed neglect of his orders to watch Sam that he sees as his failure here; when he freezes in the face of the Striga and is unable to “shoot first, ask questions later” he also fails at his role as hunter. Saving people, hunting things. Save Sammy, be Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument. These things are not always so separate for Dean. And when he feels like he’s failed?

_He looked at me different. Not that I blame him._

DEVIL’S TRAP

The three intertwined themes come to a head in the finale, _Devil’s Trap_ (1.22). After Sam and Dean interrogate Meg for their father’s location and Dean uses the Colt on a demon attacking Sam, Dean for the first time verbalizes doubts about how Saving People leads him to Hunting (Killing) Things, and what this means:

> Dean: You know that guy I shot? There was a person in there.
> 
> Sam: You didn’t have a choice, Dean.
> 
> Dean: Yeah, I know, that’s not what bothers me.
> 
> Sam: Then what does?
> 
> Dean: Killing that guy, killing Meg. I didn’t hesitate, I didn’t even flinch. **For you or Dad, the things I’m willing to do or kill, it’s just, uh …. it scares me sometimes.**

In the aftermath of the deaths of two possessed people, Dean parses the way his need to save his family leads him to kill without hesitating in the moment of danger. The hesitation comes afterwards, in the cabin when Dean has time to reflect. Killing without hesitation is something that terrifies him here, even knowing that those actions kept his family alive.

Finding out from Bobby that demons possess humans, something Sam and Dean appear not to have known previously, starts to shift Dean’s view, starts to horrify him. At the same time he realizes he’ll continue to do these things anyway – his horror lies not only in the act of killing itself, but in the fact that he’ll kill without second thought _for his family_. He’s learned the  lessons of _Something Wicked_ : “shoot first, ask questions later.” And now he’s starting to ask those questions.

What Dean is tentatively describing, what scares him, is a concept out of PTSD literature called the moral injury. In [an article written for the _PTSD Research Quarterly_](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ptsd.va.gov%2Fprofessional%2Fnewsletters%2Fresearch-quarterly%2Fv23n1.pdf&t=ZGU4ODZkNmUxNTM1ZjM4MmFjMDQyNzIxMTBmOTA0YmNkOThjODQyNixpMnBscWxzbg%3D%3D&b=t%3AjYFgja_o5_j4LSQgd5Jfjg&p=http%3A%2F%2Famonitrate.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F84968640674%2Fthis-is-what-youre-gonna-become-2&m=1) Shira Maguen and Brett Litz describe moral injury in soldiers as

> “perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to, or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.” … [I]ndividuals who struggle with transgressions of moral, spiritual, or religious beliefs are haunted by dissonance and internal conflicts. In this framework, harmful beliefs and attributions cause guilt, shame, and self-condemnation….[T]hemes included betrayal (e.g., leadership failures, betrayal by peers,failure to live up to one’s own moral standards, betrayal by trusted civilians), disproportionate violence (e.g., mistreatment of enemy combatants and acts of revenge), incidents involving civilians (e.g., destruction of civilian property and assault), and within-rank violence (e.g., military sexual trauma, friendly fire, and fragging)…. [T]aking another life [in war] was a significant predictor of PTSD symptoms, alcohol abuse, anger, and relationship problems.

In the philosophy Dean laid out in _Wendigo_ his concepts of Saving People and Hunting Things were related – he saw hunting things as the way to save people from the fate his family suffered – but there was a disconnect where the killing part was viewed almost as sport, as compensation for the life he lost in the fire that killed Mary. There is a direct dehumanization inherent in the equation – saving (innocent) _People_ versus hunting (evil) _Things_ – necessary to the act of killing what is perceived as the enemy. Dean was raised by his father and hunter culture to see the beings he kills as things, compared to the people he saves.

In _Something Wicked_ John questioned Dean’s readiness to “shoot first“ to defend the family if “someTHING tries to bust in” their motel room. Threats to the family are supposed to be things, but now Dean is grappling with the idea that some of those things might also be people. Victims, even, like Meg Masters. People who should otherwise be saved. Hence Dean’s internal conflict: Saving People and Hunting Things have crashed up against one another in a way that creates a nascent moral injury deeply tied to both the Save Sammy and Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument roles and where they overlap. This issue will develop further and deepen as the series continues and the moral landscape becomes more and more grey, as more _things_ become _people_ for Dean, as more and more he sees himself as a thing (90% Crap) rather than a person.

After this exchange between Sam and Dean their father appears to reassure Dean he has nothing to be scared of and reinforces the connection between saving people and killing as a positive, specifically negating Dean’s introspective fear and praising Dean’s willingness to kill in protection of his family:

> John: It shouldn’t [scare you]. You did good.
> 
> Dean: You’re not mad?
> 
> John: For what?
> 
> Dean: Using a bullet.
> 
> John: Mad? I’m proud of you. You know, Sam and I, we can get pretty obsessed. But you – you watch out for this family. You always have.

Note that Dean expected his father to be _angry_ at him for using one of the Colt’s bullets to save Sam’s life, despite the ingrained lessons of his childhood that put Sam first. This kind of mixed message is integral to not just parentification but to all family dysfunction. As we’ll see from John’s actual opinions later the message is: shoot first, but only when I say so, and you will be punished if you guess wrong. It should be clear from the dialog that previous experience with his father leads Dean to make the assumption that his father would be angry with him. And the weight of this expectation of how John should be behaving is enough to lead Dean to suspect his father is possessed:

> Dean: He’d be furious that I wasted a bullet. He wouldn’t be proud of me, he’d tear me a new one. You’re not my Dad.

“He’d tear me a new one.” That one line expresses so much of how Dean experiences his relationship with his father. Of course his instinct here is right, and John’s words in the Impala in the aftermath of YED’s escape proves Dean’s belief that John would be pissed at the “waste” of a precious bullet isn’t baseless: “Killing this demon comes first – before me, before everything.”

Dean’s foundational belief that the purpose of Hunting Things is to Save People is overruled by his father, who insists that hunting this one demon comes before even the safety of himself and his family – _before everything_.For John, hunting things – particularly one thing – is primary, saving people appears to be a side benefit. While John pays lip service towards hunting as a means of keeping his own family safe, it’s obvious from the fact that he repeatedly puts his sons directly in mortal danger – as early as _Something Wicked_ when he leaves them alone knowing a monster that feeds on children is present without warning Dean, through season 1 when he orders them on dangerous hunts – that the hunt, the kill, comes first. Even his children may be expendable.

The exchanges between YED!John and Dean reinforce these revelations and throw in the third major theme: 90% Crap:

> YED!John: Your Dad – he’s in here with me. Trapped inside his own meat suit. He says “hi”, by the way. **He’s gonna tear you apart.** He’s gonna taste the iron in your blood. …What? You’re the only one that can have a family? You destroyed my children. How would you feel if I killed your family? Oh, that’s right. I forgot. I did. Still, two wrongs don’t make a right.

First YED threatens (and later inflicts) torture wearing Dean’s father’s face, even framing it as something John himself rather than the YED will be carrying out. Note that the phrasing “he’s gonna tear you apart” directly echoes Dean’s expectation that John would “tear him a new one” over the bullet. Then YED explicitly links family and killing in a kind of deconstruction of Dean’s “saving people, hunting things” motto: in order to save his own family, Dean has killed YED’s family, and YED claims his torture of Dean is retaliation, invoking the cycle of vengeance and seeming to imply here and later to Sam that he killed Mary in a warped parody of self defense (she got in his way): “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Of course he’s twisting things here but the underlying truth remains, revealing the real bedrock of the Winchester Family Business to be revenge rather than saving people.

Which brings us to the theme of “90% Crap”:

> Dean: Listen, you mind just getting this over with, huh? Cause I really can’t stand the monologuing.
> 
> YED!John: Funny, but that’s all part of your M.O., isn’t it? Masks all that nasty pain, masks the truth.
> 
> Dean: Oh, yeah? What’s that?
> 
> YED!John: You know, you fight and you fight for this family, but the truth is they don’t need you. Not like you need them. Sam – he’s clearly John’s favorite. Even when they fight, it’s more concern than he’s ever shown you.

Dean’s attempt to draw YED’s attention away from Sam and onto himself (a Save Sammy move) inspires YED to name Dean’s flippant words for the facade they are and then explicitly lays out the possibility that one of Dean’s deepest fears might be true: that he carries no worth for his family other than to provide a service to them. Save Sammy, be Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument, and everything else is crap.

What doesn’t show up in the dialog for this scene is the physical nature of the interactions between YED!John and Dean. This is part of what I mentioned as the more underground/subtextual elements of the 90% Crap theme. In _Devil’s Trap_ it goes mostly unspoken, though the line about John “tasting the iron” in Dean’s blood certainly stands out when paired with the context of the physical blocking of the scene and the body language of the characters.

Comparing the differences in the way YED!John physically interacts with Sam versus Dean, a pattern emerges that develops further in several other key scenes later in the series. There’s a forced intimacy in YED!John’s body language and approach to Dean. At one point it even looks as if YED!John is about to lean in for a kiss. His face tends to be inches away from Dean’s, while he maintains a more obvious distance from Sam. I realize reading this interaction as a sexualized threat is possibly subjective, but there is a distinct visual difference between YED!John’s body language when in proximity to Dean compared to Sam, no matter how you interpret it. And while the line about tasting Dean’s blood is the closest we get to overt sexual objectification in the dialog, in my opinion it’s present in the subtext and is a precursor to the theme we’ll see much more blatantly as the series progresses.


	3. Chapter 3

SEASON 2

IN MY TIME OF DYING

Supernatural’s first season ends in a cliffhanger when a semi strikes the Impala as the Winchesters flee the horrors of the cabin where YED trapped and tormented them. The start of the second season finds Dean, who had borne the brunt of YED’s physical torture, mortally injured and in a coma. His consciousness separated from his body, Dean wanders the halls of the hospital trying to make sense of his situation. When he’s confronted by John sitting by his bedside, apparently making no effort to save Dean’s life, Dean lets loose something he’d only started to express back in _Salvation_ (1.21):

> DEAN: Call you? Are you kidding me? Dad I called you from Lawrence, all right? **Sam called you when I was dying** **.** I mean, getting you on the phone? I got a better chance of winning the lottery.
> 
> JOHN: You’re right. Although **I’m not too crazy about this new tone of yours** , you’re right. I’m sorry.

Namely, a desperate frustration that when he needs help, his father is nowhere to be found. Note how even when Dean directly references his near-fatal experience in Faith, how Sam called John at the time and heard nothing, John fails to acknowledge anything but the fact that he’s hard to reach on the phone – he says nothing about Dean’s nearly dying. Note also how John pairs his apology that Dean’s right about his unavailability as a father with emotional abuse, berating his adult son for his tone, for daring to speak up, defend himself and express any needs – behavior that is clearly unusual, if it’s so “new” that John feels the need to comment on it.

So now Dean is dying again and this time his father isn’t missing, is sitting expressionless and inscrutable right by his bedside. Knowing John can’t hear him, Dean is able to express what he could only reference before – the fear that he’s expendable:

> DEAN: Come on, Dad. You’ve gotta help me. I’ve gotta get better, I’ve gotta get back in there. I mean, you haven’t called a soul for help. **You haven’t even tried.** Aren’t you going to do anything?Aren’t you even going to say anything? **I’ve done everything you have ever asked me. Everything. I have given everything I’ve ever had.** And you’re just going to sit there and you’re going to watch me die? I mean, what the hell kind of father are you?

On one level it’s unfair to expect John to have a way to get Dean back into his body given the natural order, but this isn’t just about Dean’s fear of dying. This is about years of unspoken history. About John railing at Sam that killing the demon comes before everything while Dean bled out in the backseat of the Impala after something wearing John’s face tortured him while he begged his father to help. This is about Dean being fully aware of what he’s sacrificed for his family, as we saw the shifter verbalize to Sam in _Skin_ (1.06):

> SHAPESHIFTER: He’s sure got issues with you. You got to go to college. He had to stay home. I mean, I had to stay home. With Dad. You don’t think I had dreams of my own? But Dad needed me. Where the hell were you? …See, deep down, I’m just jealous. You got friends. You could have a life. Me? I know I’m a freak. And sooner or later, everybody’s gonna leave me… You left. **Hell,** **I did everything Dad asked me to, and he ditched me, too. No explanation, nothin’, just poof. Left me with your sorry ass.**

Fandom often claims Dean lacks self-awareness about his issues, but I think there is plenty of evidence that Dean understands more about himself than he often lets on – that Dean represses this knowledge in order to function, until it’s forced out of him either in times of crisis or through supernatural mouthpieces like the shifter.

What stands out for me about this speech in the context of this essay is how Dean names John’s instrumental parentification and how doing everything John asked (because we’ve seen the consequences for disobedience in _Something Wicked_ ) got him nothing, no acknowledgment of his sacrifices, no acknowledgment of good work done – just more abandonment, because everything John asked Dean to do _facilitated that abandonment_. One of the factors in evaluating the destructiveness of parentification is whether or not there is any support for or acknowledgment of the child’s responsibilities by the family, and we see this illustrated frankly in these scenes.

Dean may not be able to articulate that he was abused, but he’s starting to identify that he deserved better. He expresses repeatedly that despite having carried his end of the bargain, having done “everything” for John, when the chips are down he’s left with nothing. Seasons two and three – after John’s death – are often seen as the time when Dean starts to question his own childhood and John’s role as parent, but as we see here Dean was questioning these things all along. At least in the safety of his own head, perhaps even only subconsciously given that he has no knowledge of what the shifter told Sam and later will have no memory of his time as a spirit.

So what does this have to do with the themes I’ve been discussing? It draws a straight line between the Save Sammy and Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument roles John forced him into – the “everything” John asked him to do that was dredged up and held out to the light by the YED in that cabin – and the third theme, 90% crap. Echoes of _Devil’s Trap_ :

> [Y]ou fight and you fight for this family, but the truth is they don’t need you. Not like you need them. Even when [Sam and John] fight, it’s more concern than he’s ever shown you.

Look at this in the context of disembodied Dean witnessing John and Sam arguing in his hospital room while he looks on, literally invisible to them, unable to do more than shove a water glass to the floor. From Dean’s POV, the argument may have started about him and his well-being, but it quickly devolves into a rehashing of all of the issues between John and Sam, almost as if Dean’s predicament is an excuse for them to air their grievances. He’s certainly not going to see himself as their priority, here.

As this discussion progresses what I mean by 90% Crap will become clearer, but suffice to say that even this early in the series, Dean’s very aware that this “everything” he’s done isn’t enough. He’s articulating that being left, feeling expendable, feeling worth less than the revenge John seeks against not only the YED but other supernatural creatures (the very reason John regularly abandoned him with Sam in the first place), is who he is – what makes him a freak. He might play the roles John set out for him – be his father’s soldier, his brother’s keeper – but in the end he knows none of that means anything. In the end no matter what he does he’ll always be left. This isn’t merely a neurosis: that was his lived reality growing up.

Giving up on his father, Dean tries to figure things out for himself. He discovers that Reapers are taking the souls of the dying, interferes when one attempts to reap him, and communicates to Sam via ouija board that he’s on a “hunt” for this Reaper. He may believe his father has once again abandoned him, but Dean isn’t going down without a fight. What is he fighting for?

As he tells Tessa the Reaper when she reveals herself:

> DEAN: **My family’s in danger.** See, we’re kind of in the middle of this, um, war, and **they need me.**
> 
> TESSA: The fight’s over…You’re not the first soldier I’ve plucked from the field. They all feel the same. They can’t leave. Victory hangs in the balance. But they’re wrong. The battle goes on without them.
> 
> DEAN: **My brother. He could die without me.**
> 
> TESSA: Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. Nothing you can do about it. It’s an honorable death. A warrior’s death. …
> 
> DEAN:…There’s no such thing as an honorable death. **My corpse is going to rot in the ground and my family is going to die!**

They may have started via different abusive mechanisms but for Dean there is no separation here between saving people and hunting things, between Save Sammy and Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument. Giving up the war isn’t about giving up the heroism of victory, it’s about his family dying, Sam dying if Dean’s not there to protect him. Given how his father brought Dean into the hunting world to begin with in the aftermath of the trauma of Mary’s murder, giving up the fight, giving up those dual roles, is to Dean here tantamount to responsibility for his family’s destruction.

YED might have expressed Dean’s fear that his family doesn’t need him the way he needs them, but Dean believes that they do in fact need something from him: what they need from him is his body on the line as a shield. This is instrumental and emotional parentification writ large: all the responsibility lies with Dean to keep his family afloat. Again, this is not Dean taking on some kind of imagined burden; this was his literal reality. John’s entire ability to pursue his war relied on abdicating his parental responsibilities to Dean, who was tasked with not only keeping Sam alive, but as we’ll see shortly, keeping his father going emotionally.

Before Dean can make a decision whether to go with Tessa or remain a ghost, John makes a deal with YED that takes the choice away from him and returns him to his body.

Which brings me to that second aspect of parentification I haven’t yet discussed: emotional parentification. As a reminder emotional parentification occurs when a parent reverses the roles of emotional support system with a child, relying on the child for comfort and blurring parental boundaries by making the child a “confidant, secret keeper, or emotional healer” for the parent.

Shortly after Dean wakes from his coma with no memory of his time as a disembodied spirit, John comes to his bedside, appearing teary and shaken, and sends Sam on an errand before addressing Dean.  

> JOHN: You know, when you were a kid, I’d come home from a hunt, and after what I’d seen, I’d be, I’d be wrecked. And you, you’d come up to me and you, you’d put your hand on my shoulder and you’d look me in the eye and you’d… You’d say “It’s okay, Dad.” Dean, I’m sorry. **You shouldn’t have had to say that to me, I should have been saying that to you. You know, I put, I put too much on your shoulders, I made you grow up too fast. You took care of Sammy, you took care of me.** You did that, and you didn’t complain, not once. I just want you to know that I am so proud of you.
> 
> DEAN: This really you talking?
> 
> JOHN: Yeah. Yeah, it’s really me.
> 
> DEAN: Why are you saying this stuff?
> 
> JOHN: I want you to watch out for Sammy, okay?
> 
> DEAN: Yeah, dad, you know I will. You’re scaring me.
> 
> JOHN: Don’t be scared, Dean.

John for apparently the first time acknowledges not just the instrumental parentification he inflicted on his son (“You took care of Sammy”) but describes textbook emotional parentification in the way he relied on Dean for comfort (“You took care of me”). Notice how Dean’s first reaction is to wonder if John’s possessed again, this is so uncharacteristic.

We also know from _A Very Supernatural Christmas_ (3.10) that John insisted that Dean keep hunting a secret from Sam for much of Sam’s childhood, filling the confidant and secret keeper aspects of emotional parentification. John tells Dean not to be scared, but by relying on him emotionally as a child and burdening him the way he is now with more secrets from Sam, John does nothing but give Dean things to be afraid of.

Think about how that might have played out for Dean: by making hunting and the supernatural a secret even within the family for Sam’s sake (but not for Dean’s – what’s best for Dean is irrelevant, sacrificed in a triage of priorities), John has demanded that Dean be hypervigilant to an external threat to Sam (as in _Something Wicked_ ) while keeping the existence of that threat and how it impacts their lives a secret FROM Sam. John has forced Dean to keep up the pretense of normality for Sam, one he isn’t allowed to share.

Is it any wonder that Dean unquestioningly buys John’s world view as a child, in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome? What other option did he have in order to stay functional? Sam was able to question because Sam didn’t have anyone’s survival relying on his ability to follow his father’s orders without hesitation as a child; in fact for the first part of his childhood Sam didn’t know there was any life or death threat to fear to begin with.

In this speech John acknowledges both the inappropriateness of his relying on Dean for comfort this way and some of the harm it did – that it made Dean “grow up too fast.” Under other circumstances this acknowledgment of abuse may have been constructive and even healing for Dean. Instead John follows it up by doubling down on that very abuse by reiterating that Dean needs to “watch out for” his adult brother using the exact same rote phrase we saw in _Something Wicked_ , then tells Dean that he must either save Sam or kill him. Then, responsibility for Sam and the burden of more secrets handed back over to Dean, all three of Dean’s abusive roles reinforced, John abandons him for a final time by dying and going to hell.

BLOODLUST

John’s death haunts the rest of season 2 and throws Dean into an extended crisis that culminates in his making a similar deal to resurrect Sam.

As established, Dean questioning his own life isn’t new – we have evidence that he was at least subconsciously aware of wanting more for himself as far back as Skin (1.06), but in season 2 he actually starts to speak out about these issues beyond the confines of his own head.

In _Bloodlust_ (2.03) he’s confronted again with the fact that not all thingsdeserve hunting, that maybe things are just trying to survive – are in factpeople worth saving. Contrary to some fandom analysis, this is not the first time this realization has bothered Dean – it was a core fear he started to express in _Devil’s Trap_ (1.22).

> DEAN: Think about all the hunts we went on, Sammy, our whole lives. What if we killed things that didn’t deserve killing? You know? I mean, the way Dad raised us…
> 
> SAM: Dean, after what happened to Mom, Dad did the best he could.
> 
> DEAN: I know he did. But the man wasn’t perfect. And the way he raised us, to hate those things; and man, I hate ‘em. I do. When I killed that vampire at the mill I didn’t even think about it; hell, I even enjoyed it.
> 
> SAM: You didn’t kill Lenore.
> 
> DEAN: No, but every instinct told me to.

An interesting point that I don’t think has been explored is what separates Sam and Dean here, why it’s easier for Sam to see the personhood of _things_ like Lenore. And I think to understand this difference you have to go back to the fact that John conditioned Dean to see these things directly as a threat to Sam, and himself as the only thing standing in the way of harm to Sam – as in _Something Wicked_. Pair this with how Sam didn’t even know about the supernatural or hunting until he was eight or nine because the truth was deliberately kept from him, but not from Dean. Sam didn’t have the same weight of responsibility placed on his shoulders – he never felt that his ability to kill might be the only thing preventing the destruction of his family. He also had no memory of how Mary died, or of Mary herself. So John may have tried to raise them both to hate supernatural beings, but Sam never had the same incentive to internalize that hate in order to properly dehumanize _things_ to facilitate killing for the protection of his family.

Like he did with the possessed victim Meg Masters, Dean discovers that Lenore and her people – including the vampire he killed at the mill – were the ones in need of saving, and from a hunter. Once again his moral code (Saving People, Hunting Things) rubs up against the reality that those two categories, people and things, are not as easily divided as his father raised him to believe. What if hunting things – something he enjoys – is actually harming people? This moral dilemma isn’t easily brushed off for Dean, even as he continues to operate under his code. Because to give up that equation – Saving People, Hunting Things – is to give up his identity and admit that what his father taught him, how John raised him to play that role of Blunt Instrument, was a betrayal of not only what was right but what was best for Dean himself. So the moral injury continues to fester.


	4. Chapter 4

NO EXIT

Dean continues this outright questioning of what might have been best for him and how that contrasts with how his father raised him in _No Exit_ (2.06). These are ideas he seems to have never verbalized to other people before, though the seeds are there in the scenes I’ve discussed in previous sections. In Jo, Dean sees someone who aspires to follow in the footsteps of the deceased hunter father she hero worships even as Dean has started to critically question his own father. Jo assumes his resistance to the idea of her hunting is about her not being a man, but Dean sees something in Jo that he never had:

> DEAN: Jo, you’ve got options. No one in their right mind chooses this life. **My dad started me in this when I was so young… I wish I could do something else.**
> 
> JO: You love the job.
> 
> DEAN: Yeah, but I’m a little twisted.
> 
> JO: You don’t think I’m a little twisted too?
> 
> DEAN: Jo, **you’ve got a mother that worries about you. Who wants something more for you. Those are good things.** **You don’t throw things like that away.** Might be hard to find later.

Dean directly states that John “started” him in the hunting life before Dean had a choice, that the job has twisted him (into the “freak” the shapeshifter spoke of) so that it’s too late for him to do anything else even though he wishes he could do something different – and we know from _Bad Boys_ (9.06) that at one point he did in fact want something else for his life. But unlike Jo with Ellen, Dean did not experience a parent’s worry for him, a parent who wanted something more for him. He’s acknowledging here that this difference shaped who he is by telling Jo she has the chance to make a choice that was taken away from him.

Contrary to a lot of fandom meta, Dean is saying here that he is not a born hunter, that if given the chance he’d do anything else, and he also fully understands how this happened to him and places the responsibility where it belongs: on his father.

This exchange puts what might otherwise have been a positive memory in a different light, when Jo attempts to bond over their dead fathers:

>  JO: What do you remember about your dad? I mean, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Come on, tell me.
> 
> DEAN: **I was six or seven, and uh, he took me shooting for the first time.** You know, bottles on a fence, that kind of thing. I bulls-eyed every one of ‘em. He gave me this smile, like… I don’t know.
> 
> JO: He must have been proud.

First, Dean is reluctant to share – he shakes his head and only replies at Jo’s urging. And while it doesn’t stand out on the page, the way he delivers his story, his body language and tone of voice, contrast with the content of his memory and with Jo’s interpretation. Always with Dean half the meaning lies in how he says things and what he doesn’t say, his silences. He doesn’t agree with Jo’s assessment that John must have been proud. The implication is he’s now questioning and recontextualizing the things his father chose to express pride over and how that shaped him.

Note that the only role we have evidence that Dean received overt praise for as a child is Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument: his ability to fill the role of soldier, his facility with the instruments of killing. It isn’t by accident that in _Bad Day at Black Rock_ we’re shown that John sentimentally saved Dean’s first sawed off shotgun and this is contrasted with Sam’s soccer trophy. Compare Dean’s relation of this story to his relation of how John looked at him in _Something Wicked_. Look at how even John admits that Dean’s duties, inflicted on him through emotional and instrumental parentification, went without any kind of recognition until _In My Time of Dying_ , in John’s deathbed confession. Being the Good Son ([the family role of Hero](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Famonitrate.livejournal.com%2F492052.html&t=M2NhMzZmODJlZWEwYmM2N2FmOTA4MjM4OGVmODY1NWUwMjczOGViOCxIQlg2ZENyaw%3D%3D&b=t%3AjYFgja_o5_j4LSQgd5Jfjg&p=http%3A%2F%2Famonitrate.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F85171677604%2Fthis-is-what-youre-gonna-become-4&m=1)) required following in John’s footsteps when it came to hunting and shutting up about the rest of it.

Given that Dean has started to look critically at the way he thinks of the _things_ he hunts, given the way John emphasized how Watching Out for Sammy required Dean’s readiness to kill and how John insisted that everyone was expendable in the quest to kill the YED as well as the promise John forced on Dean, relating a story of his father giving him (apparently quite rare) positive reinforcement over his ability with a gun takes on layers of meaning Jo, with her mother who worries and wants more for her, who has never been expected to kill to defend someone dependent on her for protection, can’t understand.

One of the impacts parentification has on the parentified child is that it sets that child apart from the family, from the other siblings, causing a rupture in family dynamics. By putting Dean in a position where he felt Sam’s life was dependent on his choices, by relying on Dean for the kind of emotional support John should have been getting from other adults, and by creating an environment where Dean was isolated from Sam not only by being put into a position of pseudo-parental authority but by the necessity of keeping their “real” lives (hunting) including what caused the trauma that lies behind it all secret from him for much of Dean’s childhood, John not only made Dean grow up too fast but ensured that he never saw himself as a child in the first place.

As messed up as it was – and as I’ve posted about before, growing up with the extremes of parentification present here is also abuse for the non-parentified child – Sam’s childhood involved soccer trophies and _Our Town_ , where what the only thing we’ve been shown remains of Dean’s is a shotgun. Dean starts to articulate that feeling of difference to Jo in No Exit, and later in _Defending Your Life_ (7.04) sets himself apart from her and Sam both, placing the responsibility for what happened to them on himself because of this view:

> DEAN: You and Sam. I just – you know, **hunters are never kids. I never was** **.** I didn’t even stop to think about it.
> 
> JO: It’s not your fault. It wasn’t on you.
> 
> DEAN: No, but **I didn’t want to do it alone**. Who does? No, the right thing would have been to send your ass back home to your mom.

Sam and Jo got to be children, and this means they shouldn’t be hunters, because hunters are never kids. Dean himself, only a few years older, never got to be a child – while he was _developmentally_ a child, he was burdened with the responsibilities – emotional and instrumental – of an adult. Here he says so aloud, where in the past it’s only been by implication, as in this exchange from _Something Wicked_ about the child Michael who Sam and Dean roped into helping them kill the Striga:

> SAM: He’ll always know there are things out there in the dark – he’ll never be the same, you know? Sometimes I wish that….I wish I could have that kinda innocence.
> 
> DEAN: If it means anything, **sometimes** **I wish you could too**.

What goes unspoken here is that comparatively Sam _did_ in fact have a period of innocence, short as it might have been, before finding out the truth about the “things out there in the dark.” And Dean? Never had that innocence, not after the fire that killed his mother. And at that point in season one Dean can’t even conceive that he _should_ have had that innocence. Note that he doesn’t say WE, he only mentions his wish for Sam. Because hunters are never kids. Which tells me not only that Dean never viewed himself as a child when he was a child, but that as a child he viewed himself as a hunter.

Dean is also taking responsibility for both Jo and Sam being in the hunting life, when Jo made the choice for herself (and points this out) and John was responsible for Sam’s original induction into the life. Dean’s “I didn’t want to do it alone” in his exchange with Jo echoes his line from the pilot when he comes to Sam for help finding John:

> DEAN: I can’t do this alone.
> 
> SAM: Yes you can.
> 
> DEAN: Yeah, well, I don’t want to.

Sam once got out of the life by choice, and in _Defending Your Life_ Dean appears to blame himself for Sam’s catastrophic return to hunting in the first season despite the fact that this was due to YED’s actions. Sam made a free choice to help Dean find John in the pilot, and even set a boundary around it (a weekend) that Dean respected. But Dean had expressed a need to Sam for help in the pilot – and therefore he sees everything that happened after that to Sam as his fault.

Where does this come from?

This is in part classic survivor’s guilt, but that’s not the whole story. As we saw in _Something Wicked_ , when Dean attempted to do anything for himself, follow his own needs and wants as small as they were, his brother was nearly killed. John drew a direct line between Dean’s leaving the motel room and the Striga’s attack on Sam. In _Bad Boys_ we see Dean forced into a false choice between allowing himself his own needs and wants for his life and giving up his family – and John can’t even compromise enough for Dean to attend a school dance, insisting the hunt comes first.

That’s the thing about John forcing his children into the hunting life alongside him: the lives of civilians (strangers) in danger from the supernatural are always going to be seen as a crisis, and therefore more of a priority than the everyday needs of his children. What’s a school dance compared to the people who might die? And this is a mentality he instilled in Dean, as we see in _What Is and What Should Never Be_ (2.20):

> DEAN: It’s like my old life is, is coming after me or something. Like it like it doesn’t want me to be happy. Course I know what you’d say. Well, not the you that played softball but… Your happiness for all those people’s lives, no contest. Right? But why? Why is it my job to save these people? Why do I have to be some kind of hero?…Why do we have to sacrifice everything, Dad?

So not only has John convinced Dean that Sam’s life is more important than his own, Dean also learned the lesson that the lives of strangers are more important than his as well.

Given _Something Wicked_ and Dean’s discussion with Tessa in _In My Time of Dying_ , it’s clear to me that Dean believes that should he shirk his duty to his family in any way for any reason, he’ll be responsible for their deaths – so what kind of choice did he have? And in _Salvation_ we saw John berate Dean for his tone when Dean obliquely refers to his need for John’s help not only with hunts and with Sam, but for himself during the time he was dying in _Faith_.

All of these fears culminate when Dean begs John for help in _In My Time of Dying_ and the end result is John’s deal with YED. And while Dean doesn’t remember any of this until he meets Tessa again in season 4, there’s an awareness throughout season 2 that as in _Faith_ , his life came at a steep price. He asked for help and his father killed himself to give it. For possibly the first time in his life Dean dared to demand more, demand better treatment, demand acknowledgment for everything he’d given – if only in his own head – and what he got was the knowledge that his father had gone to hell for him and one last impossible abusive burden of “duty.”

This conflict between Dean’s needs and what he sees as the consequences of acting on them plays out through the series. We see it in season 6 when Dean voices to Lisa that he can’t lose her and Ben. When he tries to balance his need for them with the hunting life, the result as he sees it is that he brings nothing but danger to them, both from himself directly when he’s vamped and later when Crowley uses them as pawns. When Dean tries to act on or even express that he has needs, people he loves get hurt.

90% CRAP

> JO: [Osiris] was right about one thing. You carry all kinds of crap you don’t have to, Dean. It kinda gets clearer when you’re dead.
> 
> DEAN: Well, in that case, you should be able to see that I am 90% crap. I get rid of that, what then?
> 
> JO: You really want to die not knowing?

So why does Dean see himself as 90% crap? And how does this relate to the theme/role I’ve assigned that name?

The reversal of roles between John and Dean inherent to both types of parentification boils down to freeing John from his parental responsibilities to both of his sons in order to pursue the revenge he sees as more important, while Dean simultaneously provides emotional support/comfort to John while being robbed of receiving either emotional support or parenting himself. Of the two types of parentification [the emotional aspect is recognized as the more damaging](http://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.parentification.ua.edu%2Fuploads%2F1%2F8%2F9%2F9%2F18990327%2Fhooper-parentification.-in-r.-levesque-ed.-encyclopedia-of-adolescence.pdf&t=NzBmYmNjMjNhM2NjNTdlNTMyOGQ1NWE0NzA1NmY3YWRkNDk1ZjVmMCxIQlg2ZENyaw%3D%3D&b=t%3AjYFgja_o5_j4LSQgd5Jfjg&p=http%3A%2F%2Famonitrate.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F85171677604%2Fthis-is-what-youre-gonna-become-4&m=1). This is especially true if the child receives no other forms of emotional support. A child like Dean with no other family connections, no established sense of community other than fellow hunters, not even the stability of consistent schooling to count on, is left with very little support of any kind.

The two-pronged parentification Dean experienced is not just about serving as surrogate parent to a sibling, but about serving as surrogate spouse/confidant to a parent. It’s about never being able to fill either of those roles adequately because they’re abusive and inappropriate, but also  being prevented from filling more appropriate roles of son/sibling. There’s an inconsistency and blurring of roles that deeply undermines the parentified child’s ability to form a sense of self and agency.

I’ll come back to this in discussion of season 9, but there’s no way for a child to develop a healthy capacity for responsibility and identity if they’re a) given too much responsibility at too young an age b) given very little guidance and support for that responsibility c) not given any emotional support/parenting of their own separate from that responsibility and d) undermined/punished when they “do it wrong,” as in _Something Wicked_. Because it’s inevitable that they’re going to “do it wrong.” It’s impossible for a child to “do” parenting a fellow child and emotionally supporting an adult right.

Why _doesn’t_ John see parenting as his job? How can he view parenting as a job he can delegate to his elementary school aged son?

In order for this shifting of roles to happen, the parent has to come to see the child as no longer a child at all, and not even as a fellow adult, because then they might have to be treated as an equal instead of a subordinate. This is the part that makes it difficult for the abused child to form their own sense of personhood, because they have been emotionally enmeshed with their parent. They are not recognized as a separate person by the parent, as a child with a child’s needs, but seen as an extension of the parent’s self. The selfhood of the child is necessarily erased.

In order to meet and even anticipate the demands placed on them the parentified child quickly comes to internalize the point of view of the parent. The parent on the other hand is heavily invested in avoiding seeing anything from the pov of the child, because that would require the parent to see how they are abusing their child, to confront their abusive actions and how they have impacted the child. The relationship becomes by design a one-way street. The child supports the parent. The parent leans on the child. Who supports the child?

By taking on the parent’s pov, understanding all the pressures the parent is under as Very Important, clearly more important than the needs of the child, the child comes to see their own needs as unimportant, often to the point where they can’t even recognize they have needs. It becomes essential to the child to avoid causing trouble by potentially worrying the parent, by adding to the parent’s burden that has caused the parent to abdicate their responsibilities in the first place.

The parent reinforces this by showing minimal interest in supporting the child emotionally, because the parent feels overwhelmed and/or has other priorities, because the child downplays their own needs in the face of picking up on the fact that the parent can’t handle the child’s needs. Because the parent’s needs are primary and eclipse the needs of the child. The child sees the relationship through the parent’s pov, and the parent doesn’t attempt to see through the child’s pov at all but only through their own. Neatly, that way no one acknowledges what is happening to the child.

Robbing the child of any sense of self by turning the child into a vehicle to ease the parent’s needs, the parent comes to functionally treat the child as an object of use rather than a child to be nurtured. And for Dean, when you throw in not just the instrumental and emotional parentification but his coercion as a child into becoming a soldier in his father’s war, therefore coming to see himself as not just keeping his family together practically and emotionally speaking but as a weapon and cannon fodder in the defense of his family’s literal survival, this objectification becomes three-fold. Dean becomes a tool to John, not his son. Dean sees himself as an object to be used instead of a full person because that’s how he’s been treated.

This is what I mean by the third theme/role in Dean’s characterization. There’s the Save Sammy and Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument roles, which have defined purposes that Dean understands; but fed by the dynamics of emotional parentification where his selfhood was enmeshed with John and therefore obliterated, these two roles turn him into this object of use to others rather than a person. And by _Defending Your Life_ , he’s aware of this.

When Jo says Dean carries crap he doesn’t have to, what she’s referring to are the results of the deformations of selfhood and identity that are rooted in the three major ways he was abused by his father. Because these roles were thrust onto him at a very young age, Dean never got to develop much of an independent sense of self – therefore when Jo tells him to let go of those things, he can’t see that there would be anything left of him if he did.

_Hunters are never kids; I never was._

You have to be allowed to be a child to be able to grow into a full healthy person. Made up of the ways he’s been used and reduced to an object to fulfill the needs of others, Dean doesn’t see himself as a person at all. He’s 90% Crap.


	5. Chapter 5

ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE

John’s bedside confession in _In My Time of Dying_ sets the major internal conflict for Dean that plays out in season 2. Keep in mind that instead of repeating and reinforcing all three aspects of the way he abused Dean, John could have chosen to speak frankly to Sam himself – who was in fact an adult – about the dangers of the YED and his special children. Rather than do so John once again shifted his parental responsibilities onto Dean, left him with zero guidance on what those warnings meant or how to handle the situation, and abandoned both his sons for good.

The secret John forced onto Dean sets the two roles Dean understands for himself at loggerheads by suggesting that he may have to kill his brother, whose safety he’s been conditioned since he was a child to make his first priority. We’ve already seen the way that the potential conflicts between saving people and hunting things have caused moral dilemmas for Dean, but this promise – evoking the emotional parentification aspect of secret keeper/confidant at a moment (post-torture by a demon wearing his father’s face, shortly after waking from a fatal coma) when Dean himself was in need of comfort – creates a crisis of identity for Dean and once again isolates him from Sam, right on the heels of what was probably the first time in their lives they’d made strides to see each other as equals and forge a more equitable sense of family.

The requirements of Save Sammy and Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument are for the first time made mutually exclusive for Dean, irreconcilable. This conflict of identity slowly tears Dean apart over the course of the season in episodes such as _Crossroads Blues, Croatoan, Born Under a Bad Sign_ and _What Is and What Should Never Be_ and culminates in the two-part season finale, _All Hell Breaks Loose_.

As Sam notes in _Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things_ (2.04) Dean’s behavior gets more erratic as the season progresses. At the end of that episode Dean first talks about his suspicions that John traded himself for Dean’s life, a suspicion that deepens in _Crossroads Blues_ (2.08), where he refuses to answer Sam’s question about whether he was tempted to trade himself to the crossroads demon for their father’s return. In _Croatoan_ (2.09), when confronted with the possibility that Sam will succumb to a demonic virus, Dean refuses to leave with the townspeople he’s allied with when he has the chance, directly expressing suicidal ideation:

> SAM: Dean, I’m sick. It’s over for me. It doesn’t have to be for you. […]
> 
> DEAN: Who says I want to? I’m tired, Sam. I’m tired of this job, this life … this weight on my shoulders, man. I’m tired of it.
> 
> SAM: So what, so you’re just going to give up? You’re just gonna lay down and die? Look, Dean, I know this stuff with Dad has —
> 
> DEAN: You’re wrong. It’s not about Dad. I mean, part of it is, sure, but …

They’re interrupted before Dean can finish the thought. At the end of the episode Sam confronts him about this exchange and Dean tries at first to deflect, asking some of the same questions he’ll later ask John’s grave in _What Is and What Should Never Be_ :

> DEAN: I just think we should take a break from all this. Why do we gotta get stuck with all the responsibility, you know? Why can’t we live life a little bit?

It’s pretty clear in the context of the season that he’s not just talking about the responsibility to save the citizenry here, but about the burden he’s been struggling with since John’s death, the weight on his shoulders he mentioned earlier to Sam. The secret John tasked him with is directly connected here to Dean’s suicidal behavior in _Croatoan_. In a scene that bleeds into the next episode,  _Hunted_ (2.10), the truth finally comes out:

> SAM: You’re my brother, all right? So whatever weight you’re carrying, let me help a little bit.
> 
> DEAN: I can’t. I promised.[…] Right before Dad died, he told me something. He told me something about you. … He said that he wanted me to watch out for you, to take care of you.
> 
> SAM: He told you that a million times.
> 
> DEAN: No, this time was different. He said that I had to save you.
> 
> SAM: Save me from what?
> 
> DEAN: He just said that I had to save you, that nothing else mattered; and that if I couldn’t, I’d … That I’d have to kill you. He said that I might have to kill you, Sammy.

Sam wants to help Dean with the burden, not realizing the burden is about him, and is understandably freaked out when Dean explains the reality of what he’s been keeping from Sam.

> SAM: Kill me? What the hell is that supposed to mean?
> 
> DEAN: I don’t know.
> 
> SAM: I mean, he must have had some kind of reason for saying it, right? Did he know the demon’s plans for me? Am I supposed to go Darkside or something? What else did he say, Dean?
> 
> DEAN: Nothing, that’s it, I swear.

So because John chose not to talk to Sam directly about any of this, allowing Sam the opportunity to ask these questions of the person who actually knew anything about it, Dean’s saddled with the burden of trying to explain something that directly impacts Sam’s life without any knowledge of what any of it means. And Dean is left to deal with Sam’s reaction as well, a responsibility that should rightfully have fallen to John.

> SAM: How could you not have told me this?
> 
> DEAN: Because it was Dad, and he begged me not to.
> 
> SAM: Who cares?! Take some responsibility for yourself, Dean! You had no right to keep this from me!

Dean is torn between his obedience to John and his loyalty to his brother here, placed between them again in a way implicit to the institution of parentification. He’s in a position we’ve seen him placed in several times on the show, as when he mediated between John and Sam’s fights. Irreconcilable demands are being made of him, all because John refused to face Sam himself.

Be a brother to Sam and tell him what John said right away? Or follow his father’s authority and the burden of responsibility for Sam’s life he was trained to carry since he was a child and keep the secret? Dean chose to keep the secret, and it’s understandable that Sam sees that as a betrayal. It’s also understandable that Dean didn’t break out of the established patterns of his family structure, especially given John made him promise to keep this secret minutes before he died in payment for Dean’s life.

> DEAN: You think I wanted this? Huh? I wish to God he’d never opened his mouth. Then I wouldn’t have to walk around with this screaming in my head all day.

Sam is angry with Dean for not breaking the secret he promised his father he’d keep and Dean blames John for telling him in the first place, but both brothers are so embedded in the dynamics of the family that neither of them acknowledges that John could have told Sam himself and prevented this very crisis. Instead John abandoned Dean to the responsibility for figuring out how to navigate it all. If Dean had told Sam right away, breaking the impossible promise John saddled him with, maybe he wouldn’t have been torn apart from the conflict, and maybe Sam wouldn’t have been as angry as he is here. Although this time was “different” as Dean points out, it’s still following the the patterns for the family John established early on when Sam and Dean were young children: that information is kept from Sam, that Dean bears the burden of his father’s secrets, that Dean is responsible for Sam’s life.

It’s also replicating the larger dynamic I spoke of in a precious section of this meta: it further isolates Dean from Sam by a kind of forced teaming with John, which makes Sam in turn feel isolated from his brother and father, who he perceives as a unit bound by secrets he wasn’t privy to. The results of John’s parentification of Dean, seen here in an extreme form even for their family, drives a wedge between the brothers at a time when they need each other, just as it did during their childhood. Dean’s been unable to properly mourn John’s death because of this secret, the very secret that guaranteed he had no way to share his feelings with Sam even when Sam has encouraged him to do so.

> DEAN: And you’re pissed at me, I get it. That’s fine, I deserve it.

One of the textbook results of parentification is anger and resentment towards the parentified child from siblings, and I think this scene illustrates the whole dynamic well. While I won’t get too far into how this plays out from Sam’s POV due to the focus of this meta, typically the parentified child is seen by siblings as complicit with the parent. Because the parentified child, especially in cases that involve emotional parentification, have been made privy to the concerns of the parent in ways the other siblings have not, and as mentioned in the previous discussion tend to internalize the POV of the parent before they have a chance to develop their own perspectives, the siblings often see the parentified child as allying with the parent in a way that doesn’t accurately reflect the parentified child’s actual experience.

What the siblings (and often the parentified child) aren’t aware of is that the parentified child was never given a choice over this dynamic. The dynamic ruptures the possibility for true alliance between the siblings with one another against the parent. The parentified child is as isolated as the non-parentified siblings, but in a different way. Often anger that should be targeted at the parent is instead directed at the parentified child as the parent-surrogate, because the parent isn’t available and the parentified child serves as the “face” of an authority they don’t actually possess, for dynamics they don’t fully understand or have any control over.

I think we see examples of how John’s parentification of Dean impacted Sam and Dean’s relationship through the series, but this scene in particular drives home the no-win situation for the parentified child and the sense of anger from the sibling and where that might come from. Dean’s left with the choice between betraying his father by breaking his promise or betraying his brother by keeping it. And at this point in the series, Dean has just begun questioning his upbringing and has yet to question his Save Sammy role and how it functions. So here we’re confronted by the wider effects of parentification on Sam and Dean, reverberating even after John’s death.

Dean rejects entirely the idea of killing Sam even when faced with the possibility that he may have to (as in _Croatoan_ ), goaded into it by Meg (in _Born Under a Bad Sign_ ), or made to promise he’ll do so by Sam himself (in _Playthings_ ). Sam’s not a thing to Dean, he’s a person, the most important person, therefore killing him is out of the question. So Dean vows to save him.

But matters are taken out of Dean’s hands by the YED in _All Hell Breaks Loose_ , when Sam and all of the chosen children are whisked away to battle one another. Dean tracks Sam down right in time to see him killed. Dean and Bobby bring Sam’s corpse to an abandoned house, where Bobby tries to find some way of reaching Dean in his terrifying grief, first suggesting they give Sam a hunter’s funeral and then when that’s rejected appealing to Dean’s identity as hunter:

> BOBBY: I gotta admit, I could use your help. Something big is going down – end-of-the world big.
> 
> DEAN:Well, then let it end!
> 
> BOBBY You don’t mean that.
> 
> DEAN You don’t think so? Huh? You don’t think I’ve given enough? You don’t think I’ve paid enough? I’m done with it. All of it. And if you know what’s good for you, you’d turn around, and get the hell out of here.

The point I want to emphasize here is that what happens next is not about simple codependence, but about abuse and trauma and how those two things interact. This is every one of Dean’s traumatic fears made real: in the course of a year he’s lost both members of his remaining family to the force that killed his mother, retriggering and compounding his core trauma. Sam’s death sets off an acute psychological crisis for Dean, one Bobby clearly doesn’t fully understand.

Faced with his “failure” to Save Sam, Dean no longer has any use for his role of Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument, hence his rejection of helping Bobby save the world. He’s not even interested in vengeance at this point. The conflict of identity Dean struggled with all season implodes, triggering an annihilation of what solid sense of self he had derived from those roles, sending him straight to what’s left: 90% Crap.

The connection between Dean’s crisis state over Sam’s death with all of the ways John abused him are obvious from the monologue he delivers to Sam’s corpse:

> DEAN: You know, when we were little— and you couldn’t been more than 5— you just started asking questions. How come we didn’t have a mom? Why do we always have to move around? Where’d Dad go when he’d take off for days at a time? I remember I begged you, Quit asking, Sammy. Man, you don’t want to know. I just wanted you to be a kid just for a little while longer. I always tried to protect you, keep you safe. Dad didn’t even have to tell me. It was just always my responsibility, you know? It’s like I had one job… I had one job… And I screwed it up. I blew it. And for that, I’m sorry. I guess that’s what I do. I let down the people I love. I let Dad down. And now I guess I’m just supposed to let you down, too. How can I? How am I supposed to live with that? What am I supposed to do?

Everything I’ve been breaking down in this essay so far is present in this passage: the way Dean never saw himself as a child while attempting to protect Sam’s childhood, John’s instrumental and emotional parentification and its invisible hand (contrary to what Dean says here, we’ve seen that John explicitly told him what his responsibility was and reinforced that in a number of destructive ways, but like many abused children Dean is unable to see this and so views the dynamic as a ‘natural’ state – it’s just always been that way), the way that being unable to fill his set roles makes him feel as if he’s directly responsible for his family’s deaths.

Dean feels he failed his father by being unable to uphold the impossible tasks John bestowed on him, both as a child and in _In My Time of Dying_. He had one job, and he screwed it up, and Sam paid the price. And John laid the framework for how Dean resolves this vacuum of identity. If he can’t Save Sammy, if Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument now serves no purpose, what is he left with?

There’s a twisted kind of logic to Dean’s solution to this existential dilemma. Over the course of the season he’s grappled with the idea that “what’s dead should stay dead,” and with his own reaction to the realization that John traded himself to save Dean’s life, echoed in his calling out the selfishness of the character in _Crossroads Blues_ who made a deal to save his wife. He repeatedly expresses a sense of fatigue and is shown to be covertly and overtly suicidal. So it should be no surprise that the conclusion Dean comes to when faced with the crisis of Sam’s death is that he’s the one who should have stayed dead in the first place, if not as far back as _Faith_ , then after _In My Time of Dying_ :

> DEAN: Dad brought me back, Bobby. I’m not even supposed to be here. At least this way, something good could come out of it, you know? I–I–It’s like my life could mean something.
> 
> BOBBY: And it didn’t before?! Have you got that low of an opinion of yourself? Are you that screwed in the head?!

To Bobby’s horror, yes, Dean’s opinion of himself is that low. How does Dean justify doing the same thing to Sam that John did to Dean? In part, as he explains to Bobby, he sees it as restoring the natural order – he was supposed to be dead in the first place. But Bobby picks up on what allows Dean to find a way to fulfill his Save Sammy role even after Sam’s death: he was never a person like Sam, his life has no worth or meaning if it’s not a tool used to protect his family. As YED says before Dean kills him:

> YED: I knew I kept you alive for some reason… I couldn’t have done it without your pathetic, self-loathing, self-destructive desire to sacrifice yourself for your family.

This brings us to the crossroads, where the crossroads demon played expertly on both Dean’s crisis state and his sense of himself as 90% Crap, not even worth a standard demon deal of ten years:

> DEMON: Why would I want to give you anything? Keep your gutter soul. It’s too tarnished, anyway.

Which of course only makes Dean more desperate:

> DEMON: Make sure you bury Sam before he starts stinking up the joint.
> 
> DEAN: Wait.
> 
> DEMON: It’s a fire sale, and everything must go.
> 
> DEAN What do I have to do?
> 
> DEMON First of all, quit groveling. **Needy guys are such a turnoff.**

The crossroads demon sexualizes their interaction by laying on a flirtatious, smugly seductive air from the beginning, even referring to Dean’s desperation as a “turnoff,” while Dean offers himself up as a bargain basement deal, turning his own life into currency to be traded for Sam. Here is where we return to the recurring subtextual manifestation of the 90% Crap theme that was first hinted at in _Devil’s Trap_ : how Dean’s background of abuse leads him to see himself not as a person but as an object to be used, and how this is often reinforced contextually by nonconsensual sexual objectification of him by another character.

After all, deals with demons are sealed with a kiss.

It’s not random that only after Dean succeeds in filling his primary conditioned role of Save Sammy is he able once again take up the role of Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument:

> DEAN Which is why we gotta find this yellow-eyed son of a bitch. That’s why I’m gonna kill him myself. I mean, I got nothing to lose now, right?

It’s also instructive that only after Dean sacrifices himself this way can he express any sense of his own needs directly. When Sam confronts him about the deal, pointing out the hypocrisy:

> SAM: How did you feel when Dad sold his soul for you? ‘Cause I was there. I remember. You were twisted, and broken. And now you go and do the same thing. To me. What you did was selfish.
> 
> DEAN: Yeah, you’re right. It was selfish. But I’m okay with that. After everything I’ve done for this family, I think I’m entitled. Truth is, I’m tired, Sam. I don’t know, it’s like there’s a, a light at the end of the tunnel.

Even knowing how he himself felt over John doing the same thing, Dean sees the pain he’s caused Sam as a fair trade for Sam’s life. Because he doesn’t see himself as a person but as a tool, he fundamentally doesn’t understand that Sam might be devastated by knowing Dean traded himself to hell for Sam. When Sam asks Dean at the end of _All Hell Breaks Loose_ :

> SAM: You’ve saved my life over and over. I mean, you sacrifice everything for me. Don’t you think I’d do the same for you?

the answer is no, because no one has treated him that way since he was four. After all, Dean’s been told his whole life – not just during his childhood, but as an adult, with his father’s last words – that Sam is his responsibility, that his entire purpose is to exist to keep Sam alive.  And he’s supposed to be dead anyway.

Dean fully admits that what he did was for his own needs, as he accused Evan in _Crossroads Blues_. Part of his need was to relieve a psychological crisis the only way he knew how, part of it was connected to what he started to express back in _In My Time of Dying_ , that he’s aware that he’s given everything he has for his family and gets nothing but their deaths in return. He feels that he deserves to have this one thing: Sam alive, at the cost of how it makes Sam feel.

The trap however is that the needs Dean asserts here, after securing the annihilation of what selfhood he has, aren’t really _Dean’s_ needs at all – but are still enmeshed with John’s needs and fulfilling the roles John forced onto him. Yes, he may want for himself his brother alive, but the self-destructive lengths he went to in order to do so? Those become less about individual needs or desires and more about conditioned reaction, an aversion reflex to an acute psychological crisis shaped and compounded by a lifetime of trauma and abuse.

The healthy choice would have been for Dean to accept his brother’s death, to grieve and learn to let him go. But this is complicated stuff: the blurred line between free will and destiny, between free choice and conditioned reaction. The decisions Dean and Sam make, the actions they take that intersect with their upbringing and traumas are never as easy as wholly one or the other. Adults are responsible for their choices; at the same time unless they have support and intervention even identifying a less destructive solution, overriding conditioned reactions and making a different choice, can seem like impossibility especially in situations that are clearly repeating past traumas. This is a tug of war we see play out for all of the characters in different ways on SPN, and one we’ll come back to in discussion of season 9.


	6. Chapter 6

SEASON 3

DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME

Dean focuses more on the killer aspect of his personality in season 3, in part because he feels somewhat freed from his Save Sammy role, in part as a way to bury the fear of hell. He’s already turned himself into an object via his deal, so it makes sense that he sees himself as a disposable weapon for the first part of the season, recklessly going after demons and offering himself up as bait for vampires. He sees a light at the end of the tunnel because he feels the weight of the burden John placed on him in _In My Time of Dying_ has lifted, and for a long time it doesn’t matter to him that the light he sees is the obliteration of eternal damnation. Compared to the state he was in at Sam’s death, the idea of dying and of hell is a relief. At least he was able to fulfill his assigned role.

This starts to change in _Dream a Little Dream of Me_ (3.10). In the dream world Dean is confronted with a cozy vision of Lisa, whom he’d briefly reunited with at the beginning of the season. While Lisa had started out as a memory of the kind of carefree, carnal experience Dean spent the first part of his last year indulging in, during _The Kids are Alright_ (3.02) she starts to mean more to him. He suspects that he might be her young son’s father and then seems surprised at his own wistful sense of disappointment when Lisa tells him he’s not. When Lisa asks him about this disappointment, Dean struggles to articulate where that wistfulness is coming from:

> DEAN: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s weird, you know your life… I mean, this house and a kid… it’s not my life. Never will be. Some stuff happened to me recently, and, uh… Anyway, a guy in my situation – you start to think, you know. I’m gonna be gone one day, and what am I leaving behind besides a car? …You know, just for the record… you got a great kid. I would’ve been proud to be his dad.

He’s beginning to think of himself as a person here rather than just a tool, and he can’t quite express that Lisa’s life is something he might want for himself, because he sees it as an impossibility even without the looming deadline of hell. This goes back to what the shapeshifter said about Dean feeling like a freak, what Dean told Jo in _No Exit_ : he never had a choice over what kind of life he might want for himself, that choice was made for him when he was too young to consent to it. And now he thinks it’s too late.

By the time Lisa appears in the dreamscape of _Dream a Little Dream of Me_ it’s clear she represents something he does desire for himself – the sense that he’s loved for himself rather than what role he serves, has his own chosen family separate from the obligations John put on him, and is able to enjoy something as mundane as a picnic. But because Sam is there to witness it and this wish violates every rule of identity John forced on him, Dean’s reaction to this dream made visible is shame. A desire for his own family and his own life is a direct betrayal of the imperative duty to keep Sam as his first priority, it defies his role as Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument by shedding the hunter identity for something more domestic, and most importantly it insists that even without those two roles he’s more than 90% Crap, if someone like Lisa wants him in her life.

It’s only after he’s condemned himself to hell in order to fulfill his father’s conditioning that Dean starts to view himself as a person with valid desires for a life separate from his family of origin, possibly for the first time since the events of Bad Boys. And because of the danger this heresy represents to his current identity and the potential it has to disrupt his acceptance of his fate, he’s confronted with a dream doppelganger who represents his self-image, made up of the three roles that make it impossible for him to fulfill any other desires for himself. This dream self echoes YED!John’s words to Dean in both _Devil’s Trap_ and in _All Hell Breaks Loose_ :

> DREAM DEAN: I mean, after all, you’ve got nothing outside of Sam. You are nothing. You’re as mindless and obedient as an attack dog.
> 
> DEAN: That -That’s not true.

The dream self starts off by reinforcing those three roles: “nothing outside of Sam” = Save Sammy; “you are nothing” = 90% Crap; “attack dog” = Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument. When Dean protests, representing this nascent desire for more for himself, the dream self elaborates and rubs it in:

> DREAM DEAN: No? What are the things that you want? What are the things that you dream? I mean, your car? That’s Dad’s. Your favorite leather jacket? Dad’s. Your music? Dad’s. Do you even have an original thought? No. **No, all there is is, “Watch out for Sammy. Look out for your little brother, boy!” You can still hear your Dad’s voice in your head, can’t you?** I mean, think about it:all he ever did is train you, boss you around. But Sam …. Sam he doted on. Sam, he loved. … **Dad knew who you really were. A good soldier and nothing else. Daddy’s blunt little instrument.**

Dean has just started to imagine what he might want and dream, represented by that vision of Lisa. So his dream self plays dirty: it insists that he has no unique identity, no self, apart from what his father made him. It insists that even the material aspects of his identity, the ways he expresses himself through his love for his car and music and his very appearance, come not from himself but from his father. This is enmeshment illustrated. He might think he wants something more, but his dream self knows who he really is: a tool.

This is the voice of Dean’s internal fears and conditioning talking, the voice that’s kept him in line since childhood. As the dream self says, despite John’s death Dean can still hear his father’s voice demanding he Save Sammy, be Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument, that this was all he was good for to his father, being treated like a tool, like 90% Crap, compared to how he perceived Sam was treated. The dream self ends with the most insidious idea of all, echoing his reaction to John during _In My Time of Dying_ , reinforcing the self-concept that led Dean to make his deal in the first place:

> DREAM DEAN: Your own father didn’t care whether you lived or died. Why should you?

And this mirror of his inner thoughts prods Dean to launch into a defense of himself as a person rather than a tool, one that places the blame for these roles and the damage they’ve done squarely where they belong, on his father:

> DEAN: My father was an obsessed bastard! **All that crap he dumped on me, about protecting Sam! That was his crap.** He’s the one who couldn’t protect his family. He- He’s the one who let Mom die. – who wasn’t there for Sam. I always was! He wasn’t fair! **I didn’t deserve what he put on me. And I don’t deserve to go to Hell!**

While it may be unfair of Dean to blame John for letting his mother die, this is an airing of decades worth of repressed anger over abuse, and that’s not always rational. This is a culmination of the overt questioning Dean’s been doing since he was a disembodied spirit in _In My Time of Dying_ , when he first started to air that he deserved better from his father. As in that episode, this airing of grievances happens within a space where no one but himself can hear his rebellion, a space that literally doesn’t exist in the real world, because these are things Dean isn’t ready to say in any other way.

Dean doesn’t quite come out and say it here but he implicitly links his deal, his sacrifice of himself for Sam, with his father’s failings as a parent – the instrumental and emotional parentification – “that crap he dumped on me.” Right when it feels too late to save himself, he’s come to a realization that he didn’t deserve the fate his father forged for him as a self-sacrificial tool.

So it’s no surprise that his next action is to blow away his dream self with a shotgun. He’s only able to articulate these things through a form of self-annihilation, by killing the split off part of him who is saying what his internal voice, the voice of 90% Crap, has always told him is true about himself.  And it’s only after this confrontation where he verbalizes for himself (literally) that he didn’t deserve how he was treated by his father and destroys the dream self that represents the roles that led him to make the deal, that Dean can for the first time tentatively express to Sam that he deserves better than the fate he sealed for himself:

> DEAN: I’ve been doing some thinking, and… Well, the thing is… I don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna go to hell.
> 
> SAM: All right. Yeah. We’ll find a way to save you.
> 
> DEAN: Okay, good.

Given that his deal stipulates that if Dean himself tries to get out of his contract Sam will die, Dean agreeing to the idea that he might be saved is a huge step, both in seeing himself as a person worthy to be saved rather than a thing to be used, but also in defying his role of Save Sammy that got himself there in the first place.

But the show doesn’t let us off that easy, because Dean’s first articulations of the desire to be saved, to be more than a tool, to be a person, is followed by a flashback to how the earlier confrontation between himself and his inner voice ended, with the self he obliterated returning to life with the black eyes of a demon:

> DREAM DEAN: You can’t escape me, Dean. You’re gonna die. And this? This is what you’re gonna become!

Things aren’t so easily resolved for Dean despite getting to the point where he can acknowledge it’s okay to not want to die. His assertion of worth, value, personhood within the dream state, the one that allows him to express to Sam an oblique wish to be saved that Sam makes concrete, was immediately countered by the resurrection of the embodiment of the 90% Crap identity and its insistence that Dean’s ultimate deserved fate is to die and become a demon in hell. “This is what you’re gonna become” implies that a demon in hell is all Dean deserves.

Like Dean’s dream self, these issues don’t die so easily.

SEASON 4

HEAVEN AND HELL

Despite desperate efforts to save him, at the end of the third season Dean is dragged to hell by Lilith’s hellhounds. Season 4 opens with Dean clawing his way out of his own grave, mysteriously resurrected. By the end of the first episode he learns that he was returned to life on earth by intervention of heaven. And as [misterdeanvimes](http://tmblr.co/m4DBgKr7I7QTVaDJb22PgcA) pointed out:

> of course Dean was pulled out of Hell so he can _do a job_. Story of Dean’s life right there: _we have work for you_.

The angel Castiel was ordered by heaven to rescue Dean from hell not for himself, but because the angels want him as a tool: because they had a job for him. As we’ll see, that job will ultimately betray the intention to literally turn Dean into an object, a vessel, obliterating his selfhood in order to become a weapon in service of their war.

At first Dean embraces his resurrection as a second chance at life. But as the season progresses and significantly after he is confronted with hallucinations of Lilith and a yellow eyed Sam in _Yellow Fever_ (4.07), it becomes obvious that what happened in hell was traumatic for Dean. It isn’t until Alastair shows up that Dean tells anyone exactly what happened to him in hell. At the end of _Heaven and Hell_ _(_ 4.10) Dean describes to Sam how he was brutally tortured daily, only to be offered a mockery of a way out:

> DEAN: Alastair… at the end of every day… every one… he would come over. And he would make me an offer. To take me off the rack if I put souls on, if I started the torturing. And every day, I told him to stick it where the sun shines. For 30 years, I told him. But then I couldn’t do it anymore, Sammy. I couldn’t. And I got off that rack. God help me, I got right off it, and I started ripping them apart.

As Elaine Scarry writes in the book _The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World:_

> Torture systematically prevents the prisoner from being the agent of anything and simultaneously pretends that he is the agent of some things. **Despite the fact that in reality he has been deprived of all control over, and therefore all responsibility for, his world, his words, and his body, he is to understand his confession as it will be understood by others, as an act of self-betraya** **l** …the torturers are producing a mime in which the one annihilated shifts to being the agent of his own annihilation.

In Dean’s first confession to Sam, he allows for the fact that an eternity of horrific torture drove him to take Alastair’s offer. Torture inherently removes all agency from the one tortured, with the object of “breaking” a prisoner, often for the purpose of “confession” of some sort, and as a rule everyone eventually succumbs. Here, Alastair replaces confession with the tortured taking up the role of torturer. Faced with a literal eternity of pain in hell there is no more agency involved, no more choice, in this act then there is in traditional torture of political prisoners, but the end result is the same: make the tortured responsible for their own feeling of self-betrayal by acting as if they have made a choice.

By the next time Dean speaks of what happened in hell, at the end of _Family Remains_ (4.11), he’s fully illustrating this passage. He understands his act as one of self-betrayal, sees himself as the agent of his own annihilation:

> DEAN: You know, I felt for those sons of bitches back there. Lifelong torture turns you into something like that.
> 
> SAM: You were in hell, Dean. Look, maybe you did what you did there, but you’re not them. They were barely human.
> 
> DEAN: Yeah, you’re right. I wasn’t like them. I was worse. They were animals, Sam, defending territory. Me? I did it for the sheer pleasure….I enjoyed it, Sam. They took me off the rack, and I tortured souls, and I liked it. **All those years, all that pain. Finally getting to deal some out yourself. I didn’t care who they put in front of me. Because that pain I felt, it just slipped away.** No matter how many people I save, I can’t change that. I can’t fill this hole. Not ever.

Alastair “broke” Dean by forcing a reversion of Dean’s personal philosophy and any sense of identity he held onto – instead of saving people, he tortures them, instead of hunting things, he becomes the thing. Alastair explicitly gets him there via torture, which literally turns the prisoner into an object to be acted on, into a screaming nerve end, erasing their personhood. Dean blames himself for taking the only way out he was given after 30 years of continual horrific pain and daily destruction of his body “until there was nothing left”: inflict pain on someone else. Exchange the objectification of the tortured with the objectification of becoming someone else’s weapon. Exchange endless physical pain for endless moral injury. Either way there’s no actual choice involved, but the very means of torture creates that “mime” Scarry describes, a mime of choice, that twists things in order to force the tortured to take responsibility for the torturer’s actions by blaming themselves for what they see as the personal betrayal of wishing to end their own acute pain.

There’s a direct line to be traced from Dean’s expression of fear over what he’ll do to save his family via killing in s1 to this moment, and that process began when John put a gun into his hand when he was six years old. Save Sammy lead Dean to make the deal that put him in hell, into Alastair’s control, where Alastair tortures Dean until he takes up the razor himself. He calls Dean his pupil, as if Dean was there voluntarily to learn a skill, a neat bit of gaslighting integral to the institution of torture. John put a gun in Dean’s hand when he was a young child; Alastair puts a razor in Dean’s hand when he’s reduced to a state of less agency even than childhood. Already having experienced years of the dehumanization of killing prior to hell as well as the objectification of abuse, daddy’s blunt little instrument becomes Alastair’s pupil with promise, and because of his conditioning from John as well as the dynamics Scarry describes, Dean sees this as making a free choice to be a monster.

Even after his confession to Sam, Dean clings to the idea that the angels have brought him back for something good. But as Tessa warns in _Death Takes a Holiday_ (4.15):

> TESSA: Stop lying to yourself, Dean. …The angels have something good in store for you. A second chance. Really? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure, deep down, you know something nasty’s coming down the road. Trust your instincts, Dean. There’s no such thing as miracles.

We learn in the next episode one of the nasty things the angels had in store for Dean, and it isn’t a second chance or a way to heal from hell. Far from it.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> extra warnings on this post: heavily discusses On the Head of a Pin. 
> 
> Torture, sexual assault, physical assault, coercion, child abuse, misogyny and gendered slurs, ptsd, moral injury, blood, incest.

ON THE HEAD OF A PIN

The ongoing theme of coercion and Dean used as a tool is continued when the angels take Dean against his will to torture a captured Alastair in _On the Head of a Pin_ (4.16). As Uriel flatly states to Dean, they weren’t asking. Which Castiel tries to soften, but the truth is at that point Dean has no idea where he is, in a building with his torturer, and has been told he has no choice, that he’s a tool to them, because he knows too well from Alastair that given enough pressure, pain and time, he can be made to do things he doesn’t want to do:

> DEAN: Everybody’s dying these days. And hey, I get it. **You’re all-powerful. You can make me do whatever you want.** But you can’t make me do this.
> 
> CASTIEL: This is too much to ask, I know. But we have to ask it.

They way they’ve “asked” however reeks of coercion rather than free choice: is Dean allowed to say no, to leave?  Dean seems to see the writing on the wall even as Cas tries to pretty it up for him.

Castiel frames saving people (saving humanity from the apocalypse) as dependent on finding out who is slaughtering angels, and claims this can only be done by Dean turning to torture, to making himself a weapon – becoming the extreme form of Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument that has caused him so much traumatic pain since hell. Even Anna, who we’ve seen treat Dean’s trauma from hell with compassion, speaks of him as an object of use to the angels when she argues against having him torture. Notice how she words it as “letting” Dean do something that he had very little choice over – “letting” carries the connotation that this was Dean’s idea in the first place, something he wanted to do that the angels are indulgently allowing:

> ANNA: Why are you **letting** Dean do this?
> 
> CASTIEL: He’s doing God’s work.
> 
> ANNA: Torturing? That’s God’s work? Stop him, Cas, please. **Before you ruin the** **one real weapon you have.**

Dean is the “one real weapon” the angels have in this fight. While Anna is clearly questioning the idea that torturing is something God would want let alone condone, she frames it to Castiel as not about Dean’s value as a person, but as his value as an object, a weapon. Whether she believes this herself or is using the idea to try to reach Castiel is left ambiguous.

When Dean tells Castiel “You ask me to open that door and walk through it, you will not like what walks back out,” he echoes Anna’s suggestion that torturing might be his ruin. He also speaks of himself as an object or thing, as a what rather than a who.  So it’s no surprise that the framing of Dean as an object in 4.16 reaches its apex once he’s confronted with Alastair.

> ALASTAIR: Heaven, I’m in heaven, and **my heart beats so that I can hardly speak**. I seem to find the happiness I seek, when we’re out together **dancing cheek to cheek** …
> 
> DEAN: Now answer the question.
> 
> ALASTAIR: Or what? You’ll work me over? But then, maybe you don’t want to. (singsong) Maybe you’re a little scared to.

Notice how despite being the one chained up, Alastair establishes immediate dominance by reducing Dean into an object, beginning with sexualizing their interaction. His first words to Dean are the sung lyrics of a love song. Alastair’s “heart beats so that [he] can hardly speak,” in love or sexual attraction. He places Dean in the position of lover, the object of his happiness, of that love or lust – “dancing cheek to cheek” – in intimate sexualized contact. Then by observing that Dean is afraid (something Dean never denies), he takes the song lyrics where he reduced Dean into an object of lust and re-inscribes them with a vibe of sexualized menace. After all, the object of a love song wouldn’t otherwise be _scared_.

> DEAN: I’m here, aren’t I?
> 
> ALASTAIR: Not entirely. You left part of yourself back in the Pit. Let’s see if we can get the two of you back together again, shall we?
> 
> DEAN: You’re gonna be disappointed.
> 
> ALASTAIR: You have not disappointed me so far. Come on. You gotta want a little payback for everything I did to you. For **all the pokes and prods**.

More possible subtext of sexual assault: “pokes and prods.” Alone this could be seen as any kind of torture, but in the context of the initial evocation of intimate, sexualized contact paired with established fear?

> ALASTAIR:How about for all the things I did to your daddy? I had your pop on my rack for close to a century….John Winchester. Made a good name for himself. A hundred years. After each session, I’d make him the same offer I made you. I’d put down my blade if he picked one up….But he said nein each and every time. Oh, damned if I couldn’t break him….Pulled out all the stops, **but John, he was, well, made of something unique. The stuff of heroes.** And then came Dean. Dean Winchester. I thought I was up against it again…. **But** **daddy’s little girl** **, he broke.** He broke in thirty. Oh, just not the man your daddy wanted you to be, huh, Dean?

Alastair explicitly compares Dean – daddy’s little girl who broke – with his father, “the stuff of heroes,” the real man.

Dean tries to assert his personhood, insisting on his ability to dream even in hell. It carries echoes of the coping of abused children, to have dreams – something first seen in s1’s _Skin_ and later echoed in s9’s _Bad Boys_  when Dean talks about dreaming of being a mechanic or a rock star, anything other than a hunter. In hell, though, Dean’s dreams are of revenge:

> DEAN: You know something, Alastair? I could still dream. Even in hell. And over and over and over, you know what I dreamt? I dreamt of this moment. And believe me, I got a few ideas.

In her book _Trauma and Recovery_ _,_ Judith Herman addresses how and why revenge fantasies like Dean’s arise and the impact they have on the victim of trauma, usually negative:

> The revenge fantasy is often a mirror image of the traumatic memory, in which the roles of perpetrator and victim are reversed. It often has the same grotesque, frozen, and wordless quality as the traumatic memory itself. The revenge fantasy is one form of the wish for catharsis. The victim imagines  that she can get rid of the terror, shame, and pain of the trauma by retaliating against the perpetrator. The desire for revenge also arises out of the experience of complete helplessness. In her humiliated fury, the victim imagines that revenge is the only way to restore her own sense of power. She may also imagine this is the only way to force the perpetrator to acknowledge the harm he has done her.
> 
> Though the traumatized person imagines that revenge will bring relief, repetitive revenge fantasies actually increase her torment….They exacerbate the victim’s feelings of horror and degrade her image of herself. They make her feel like a monster. They are also highly frustrating, since revenge can never change or compensate for the harm that was done. **People who actually commit acts of revenge, such as combat veterans who commit atrocities, do not succeed in getting rid of their post-traumatic symptoms; rather they seem to suffer the most severe and intractable disturbances.**

As if echoing this passage, Alastair mocks any benefit Dean hopes to gain by playing out his dreams of revenge via torture:

> ALASTAIR: Do you really think this is gonna fix you? Give you closure? That is sad. That’s really sad. Sad, sad. I carved you into a new animal, Dean. There is no going back.

 Alastair reasserts Dean’s objecthood: dreams or not, Dean wasn’t a person in hell, he was an object to be acted upon. He was “carved into a new animal.” He’s the lock that needs to be picked to break the first seal. Everyone breaks eventually under torture, that’s how torture works – torture turns a person into an object. This is made literal for Dean, as Dean becomes not a person but a seal, a pawn in a larger game. Just a domino to be toppled, setting off a chain reaction. An object of use to the angels now, he was first an object of use to the demons. Perversely, this objectification of Dean is given a religious slant here:

> ALASTAIR: Honestly, Dean… You have no idea how bad it really was, and what you really did for us… The whole bloody thing, Dean. The reason Lilith wanted you there in the first place. You know, it was supposed to be your father.  He was supposed to bring it on. But, in the end, it was you.
> 
> DEAN: Bring what on?
> 
> ALASTAIR: Oh, every night, the same offer, remember? Same as your father. And finally you said, “Sign me up.” Oh, the first time you picked up my razor, the first time you sliced into that **weeping bitch** … That was the first seal….And it is written that the first seal shall be broken when a righteous man sheds blood in hell. As he breaks, so shall it break. We had to break the first seal before any others. Only way to get the dominoes to fall, right? Topple the one at the front of the line. When we win, when we bring on the apocalypse and burn this earth down, we’ll owe it all to you, Dean Winchester. Believe me, son, I wouldn’t lie about this. It’s kind of a religious sort of thing with me.

Alastair refers to the first person Dean tortured as a “weeping bitch” – implying that Dean too had once been exactly that. Reinforcing the misogyny, trying to emasculate Dean. Misogyny reduces women to objects to be acted on, therefore if men are put into this position, they become women. They become little girls, weeping bitches.

In this sequence that could be read as a re-enactment of their relationship in hell, Alastair first establishes a menacing sexualized dominance over Dean, forcing him into the role of lover, then emphasizes that Dean’s father stood up to torture and didn’t break, retaining his masculinity, unlike daddy’s little girl Dean, who broke like a weeping bitch. This entire process both objectifies Dean (on several levels and through several different strategies) and undermines any kind of power he might have otherwise “gained” via the reversal of roles with Alastair. It removes the element of agency from that act and emphasizes that there was never a real choice to begin with.

And by escaping from his chains, turning the tables on Dean with a savage beating through overwhelming force that Dean has no chance to defend himself against, and promising that Dean will be back in hell in the position of subordinate pupil/object on the rack – note that Alastair at one point literally holds Dean’s insensate body up against the actual rack Castiel built – Alastair removes any kind of power Dean might have derived from being coerced into acting as torturer by the angels, and any “closure” he might have gained from acting out his dreams from hell. It reinforces that he never had any power in hell to begin with. He was always an object to be acted on, whether he was on the rack or acting out his role of the new animal Alastair carved.

In the hospital after Alastair’s beating, Dean asks Castiel to confirm what Alastair told him, taking upon himself (again) the blame that lies with his torturer:

> DEAN: Is it true? Did I break the first seal? **Did I start all this?**
> 
> CASTIEL: **Yes**. When we discovered Lilith’s plan for you, we laid siege to hell and we fought our way to get to you before you—
> 
> DEAN: Jump-started the apocalypse.
> 
> CASTIEL: And we were too late.
> 
> DEAN: Why didn’t you just leave me there, then?
> 
> CASTIEL: It’s not blame that falls on you, Dean, it’s fate. The righteous man who begins it is the only one who can finish it. **You have to stop it.**

Notice again that Dean’s rescue was not for himself, for his own benefit, but for what use he might serve for someone else. For his position as tool – when they couldn’t stop Alastair from turning Dean the key in the lock of the first seal, the angels turn to seeing Dean as the tool to stop the apocalypse. There’s no comfort from Castiel for Dean here. In an echo of the bedside scene in _In My Time of Dying_ , Dean wakes from a coma after being brutally tortured in order to be given yet another burden. Not just to Save Sammy this time, but to save heaven and earth, an even more impossible task.

> CASTIEL: I know our fate rests with you.
> 
> DEAN: Well, then you guys are screwed. I can’t do it, Cas. It’s too big. Alastair was right. I’m not all here. I’m not—I’m not strong enough. Well, I guess I’m not the man either of our dads wanted me to be. Find someone else. It’s not me.

Notice how everything I’ve broken down here: the way both the angels and Alastair reduce Dean into an object, a tool, is explicitly linked to John: Alastair repeatedly emphasized this comparison, which subtextually plays on Dean’s knowledge that the reason John was in hell in the first place is because he made a deal to save Dean’s life. And in the end Dean sees both his breaking in hell and his feelings of insufficiency in the face of the impossible task Castiel and the angels have placed on him – to be the Righteous Man, the weapon that stops the apocalypse, which we later find out means literally being reduced to an object to be possessed by Michael – in terms of failing his father. His father, who was the first to reduce Dean into an object to be used, into a weapon.

SAVE SAMMY REDUX

Retracing our steps a bit to _In the Beginning_ (4.03), we see that every connection Dean has to the hunting life, to his role as daddy’s blunt little instrument, is eventually tainted. In a scene that carries echoes of the confrontation in _Devil’s Trap_ , the YED possesses another of Dean’s relatives – his grandfather. As in _Devil’s Trap_ , the YED reveals himself only after Dean refuses to hand over the Colt. Then he traps Dean in a chair, paralyzed, while looming over him in a physically intimate way, even sniffing him at one point. This sexualized intimacy by a (possessed) family member is paired with a reiteration of the threat to Sam and to Dean’s saving people role:

> DEAN: You look into my eyes, you son of a bitch, ‘cause I’m the one that kills you.
> 
> YED!Samuel: So, you’re gonna save everybody, is that right? Is that it? Well, I’ll tell you one person that you’re not gonna save. Your Grandpappy.

In addition, through YED!Samuel’s incestuous sniffing and physical looming over Dean in this scene as well as the way the YED seals Mary’s deal for John by forcing her to kiss her own possessed father, Dean’s family legacy of hunting is explicitly linked with subtextual themes of sexualized violence, incest, and therefore ultimately with abuse.

At the end of the episode, Castiel reinforces Dean’s Save Sammy role again, telling Dean that he wasn’t sent back in time to save his family at all:

> CASTIEL: We know what Azazel did to your brother. What we don’t know is why – what his endgame is. He went to great lengths to cover that up. … **You brother is headed down a dangerous road, Dean, and we’re not sure where it leads. So stop it. Or we will.**

Instead the goal was to place a burden of responsibility for his brother onto Dean, just as John did in season 2. In season 4, Save Sam becomes saving Sam from himself.

Back in season 2, Sam made Dean promise that he would “watch out” for Sam, that if Sam ever “turned into something [he’s] not” Dean would kill him. While in season 2 Sam never came close to changing in the way he feared, in season 4 we learn that what he’s doing “scares the hell” out of himself. That he feels the demon blood he’s drinking changing him, but feels like he can’t stop if he wants to succeed at killing Lilith. By the time of _The Rapture_ (4.20) when Dean finds out the powers Sam’s been using to exorcise and fight demons come from drinking their blood, Sam is addicted physically.  Dean and Bobby lock Sam in Bobby’s panic room, hoping to detox him, a process that might be fatal.

When Bobby suggests in _When the Levee Breaks_ (4.21) that Saving Sam might lead to losing the apocalypse, Dean’s response is interesting given the context of this essay:

> BOBBY: Well, I don’t like this any more than you do, but Sam can kill demons. He’s got a shot at stopping Armageddon.
> 
> DEAN: So what? Sacrifice Sam’s life, his soul, for the greater good? Is that what you’re saying? Times are bad, **so** **let’s use Sam as a nuclear warhead**?

Dean explicitly points out and rejects the idea of using his brother as a weapon. Dean calls Castiel, who’d originally tasked him with stopping Sam in the first place, for help. When Dean asks whether Sam would be able to kill Lilith, Cas reports that this would irrevocably change Sam in the way Sam himself feared back in season 2:

> CASTIEL: Consuming the amount of blood it would take to kill Lilith would change your brother forever. Most likely, he would become the next creature that you would feel compelled to kill.

Castiel offers an alternative to this fate for Sam: that Dean accept the role the angels have fated for him, via an oath:

> CASTIEL: You give yourself over wholly to the service of God and his angels? You swear to follow his will and his word **as swiftly and obediently as you did your own father’s**?

Dean’s acceptance of his role here, how he is seen by the angels to be of use to them, directly references John. The obedience we’ve seen in this meta was conditioned by abuse. Cas and the angels are just asking him to transfer his learned role of Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument from John to Heaven, in hopes of Saving Sam. And as we’ve seen, that very obedience, those roles, rely on Dean’s view of himself as 90% Crap.

Interestingly, though Cas did not objectify Dean in the sexualized manner we’ve seen accompany scenes like this that underlines Dean being used to fulfill these roles, when Bobby learns of Dean’s oath his response echoes Alastair’s “weeping bitch” language of misogynist  sexualized subordination:

> BOBBY: Correct me if I’m wrong, but you willingly signed up to be **the angels’ bitch**?

Later when it’s clear Sam’s detox may kill him, Bobby suggests they give Sam some blood, which Dean refuses with at least he’ll die human. Echoes of the promise Sam forced on him in season 2, echoes of John’s requirement that he save or kill Sam. Dean no longer sees saving and killing Sam as the crisis of colliding identities that drove him to make his deal – Dean sees saving Sam as letting him die before he becomes the thing he feared:

> DEAN: I would die for him in a second, but I won’t let him do this to himself. I can’t. I guess I found my line. I won’t let my brother turn into a monster.

Having used the hope of saving Sam to secure Dean’s oath as the angel’s tool, Castiel releases Sam from the panic room to fill _his_ role for the angels – drinking enough blood to change him, in order to kill Lilith. Because Dean’s assigned role isn’t stopping the breaking of the seals at all, as he believes; the seals have to be broken in order to release Lucifer. Though he doesn’t know it yet the role the angels have assigned Dean is something altogether different. As he’ll learn from Zachariah, the angels aren’t interested in stopping the Apocalypse, but in facilitating it.


	8. Chapter 8

SEASON FIVE

THE MICHAEL SWORD

At the end of the fourth season Sam successfully kills Lilith only to learn her death was the final seal that releases Lucifer. As season 5 begins in _Sympathy for the Devil_ (5.01) Sam and Dean, racing to find a way to stop the Apocalypse, are told the prophet Chuck had a vision of a “Michael sword” which the angels lost on earth. Dean tracks Chuck’s clues to one of their father’s storage lockers, only to find Zachariah waiting.

> ZACHARIAH: And to think…[the demons] could have grabbed it any time they wanted. **It was right in front of them** …We did lose the Michael sword. We truly couldn’t find it. Until now. You’ve just hand-delivered it to us….It’s you, chucklehead. **You’re the Michael sword.** What, you thought you could actually kill Lucifer? **You simpering wad of insecurity and self-loathing?** No. You’re just a human, Dean. And not much of one.
> 
> DEAN: What do you mean, I’m the sword?
> 
> ZACHARIAH: **You’re Michael’s weapon** **.** Or, rather, his…receptacle….You’re the vessel. Michael’s vessel.
> 
> DEAN: How? Why—why me?
> 
> ZACHARIAH: Because you’re chosen! It’s a great honor, Dean.
> 
> DEAN: Oh, yeah. Yeah, **life as an angel condom** **.** That’s real fun. I think I’ll pass, thanks.

Zachariah refers to Dean as “it,” as a thing, as “the Michael sword,” a vessel rather than a person. The objectification – Dean as weapon – is clear from this passage, and clearly tied to a line representing Dean’s 90% Crap role as well. And though Zachariah doesn’t sexualize his interactions with Dean, Dean himself compares the idea of becoming an angelic vessel to being an object linked to sex, a condom. Something inherently disposable.

Earlier in the episode when Dean still believed they were looking for an actual sword, the demon possessing Bobby connects it (Dean-as-weapon) directly with John:

> DEMON!BOBBY: So you think your dad had the Michael sword all this time?

Shortly after this, the demon!Bobby attacks Dean and Meg arrives on the scene. While Dean (and the audience) don’t know it yet, the demons have a reason to eliminate him, as Michael is the only thing standing in Lucifer’s way:

> MEG:We really owe your brother a fruit basket…[Y]ou’re the only bump in the road. So every demon—every single one—is just dying for a piece of you.
> 
> DEAN: Get in line.
> 
> MEG: **Oh, I’m in the front of the line,** **baby. Let’s ride.**
> 
> **[MEG kisses DEAN.]**
> 
> DEAN: What is that, peanut butter?
> 
> MEG: You know, your surrogate daddy’s still awake screaming in there. And I want him to know how it feels slicing the life out of you

In what we’ll see is a pattern, Dean responds to the sexualized assault with a joke, in an attempt to brush off and take control of the situation.

So in the very episode where Dean discovers that his use to the angels is as a vessel, being turned into a weapon, this weapon is directly linked to John, and Dean is physically and sexually assaulted by Meg. Dean himself links this turning of himself into an object with sex. And when Dean realizes that Michael needs his consent to take him as a vessel and attempts to say no, Zachariah tortures him and Sam.

Increasingly desperate to find a way to stop the Apocalypse, a turning point for Dean comes in _Abandon All Hope_ (5.10) when the Colt fails to kill Lucifer. In this episode, Meg refers to hellhounds as Dean’s “favorite” in a reminder of his death and experience in hell, and Ellen and Jo are killed. By the time of _Sam, Interrupted_ (5.11) a few weeks later, Sam is expressing concern for Dean, who denies anything is wrong. While undercover as a patient in a psychiatric hospital Dean has two conversations with a psychologist –  later revealed to exist only in Dean’s head, a product of hallucinations brought on by the wraith they’re hunting – that reveal Sam has reason to be worried.

In their first “conversation” Dr. Cartwright asks Dean about his sleep and drinking habits and then suggests they’ll talk about Dean’s father. When Sam later asks him if he’s okay, Dean flat out says he’s not and refers to the conversation as being “theraped.” Starting with that condom comment in Sympathy for the Devil and paralleling this storyline centering around Dean as vessel, Dean frequently refers to himself in sexualized terms. In _Free to be You and Me_ (5.03) for example, Dean asks Castiel if he’ll end up like Raphael’s vessel “if Michael jumps my bones.” He asks Zachariah if he’s “gonna ball-gag” Dean until he consents in _Dark Side of the Moon_ (5.16) and in _Point of No Return_ (5.18) refers to Michael getting a “piece of this sweet ass.” Dean’s use of the language of dubious sexual consent if not outright rape parallels Zachariah pursuing Dean’s “consent” to turn him into an object through any means, including torture – a mime of consent that is coercion at best and directly parallels Alastair’s tactics and the rhetorical gaslighting of the torturer.

In their second “conversation,” Dr. Cartwright asks Dean why he has to be the one to hunt monsters:

> DEAN: **Can’t find anybody else that dumb.** It’s my job. Somebody’s gotta save people’s asses, yours included…. It’s the end of the world, okay? I mean, it’s a damn Biblical apocalypse, and **if I don’t stop it and save everyone, then no one will** , and we all die.
> 
> DR. CARTWRIGHT: That’s horrible.
> 
> DEAN: Yeah, tell me about it.
> 
> DR. CARTWRIGHT: I mean, apocalypse or no apocalypse…monsters or no monsters, **that’s a crushing weight to have on your shoulders** **.** To feel like six billion lives depend on you…God…how do you get up in the morning?
> 
> DEAN: That’s a good question.

Instead of seeing himself as a hero, Dean starts his answer with self-depreciation that flatly links the idea that he has to save everyone with seeing himself as 90% Crap. In the idea that he alone has to stop the Apocalypse or no one will because he’s the only one “dumb enough” to take on the burden, I see echoes of him left alone to care for Sam as a child, no one else around and Sam’s life dependent on him. Notably Dean is only able to acknowledge the “crushing weight” of this responsibility through the voice of a figment of his own imagination. This calls back to episodes like _In My Time of Dying_ and _Dream a Little Dream of Me_ in terms of Dean only feeling safe enough to express himself at this level while in a space that doesn’t really exist outside of his mind, be it the spirit world, dreamland, or a hallucination.

Beginning with Castiel’s labeling Dean the “righteous man” in _On the Head of a Pin_ and escalating steadily throughout season 5, Dean’s roles of saving people and hunting things transform into saving everyone – heaven and earth – and hunting Lucifer.

Dean’s mental state, already precarious after Jo and Ellen’s deaths, devolves quickly in the last half of the season. In _The Song Remains the Same_ (5.13) Castiel sends Dean and Sam back to the past where Dean is confronted for the first time with Michael, possessing a younger version of John. Unlike Zachariah, Michael doesn’t attempt to torture Dean into saying yes. Instead, in a scene with echoes of YED!John in _Devil’s Trap_ and YED!Samuel in _In the Beginning,_ while wearing the body of Dean’s father Michael exhibits a sense of ownership by adjusting Dean’s clothing for him in an intimate gesture as if Dean’s body was already Michael’s own. Telling Dean vesselhood is in his bloodline, Michael stresses the futility of resisting his “role”:

> MICHAEL: And you think you know better than my father? One unimportant little man. **What makes you think you get to choose?**
> 
> DEAN: Because I got to believe that I can choose what I do with my unimportant little life.
> 
> MICHAEL: You’re wrong. You know how I know? Think of a million random acts of chance that let John and Mary be born, to meet, to fall in love, to have the two of you. Think of the million random choices that you make, and yet how each and every one of them brings you closer to your destiny. Do you know why that is? Because it’s not random. It’s not chance. It’s a plan that is playing itself out perfectly. **Free will’s an illusion, Dean. That’s why you’re going to say yes.**

While Dean tries to assert his selfhood here, his right to make a choice, Michael dismisses it. Dean becoming an object, Michael’s body-as-weapon, “playing his role” as Gabriel scolded in _Changing Channels_ , is seen as fate.

If you look at the themes of destiny/fate versus free will as a complex metaphor for human experience, what you get is the muddy question of how much free will a person actually has who grows up formed by child abuse and trauma, not to mention the society they live in. Dean’s family roles certainly feel like destiny or fate to him – in the sense that this is something he feels he is rather than a role he’s been conditioned to fill – but that’s also not accurate, and holds him back from being able to identify the harm those roles contribute to as well as how he can break free of them. I’ll come back to this idea later but I don’t think it’s an accident that throughout the series, the idea of what is destiny and what is choice is an ongoing discussion of sorts. In season 2, Sam believes his destiny is to end up “evil” because he’s one of the chosen children, and this is something Dean refutes, insisting that he doesn’t believe in destiny. Yet as we’ll see in the next post, by season 5 in the context of saying yes to Michael, Dean’s talking about “what he’s meant to be.”

The angels believe in destiny and fixed roles, and as Gabriel suggests, play this out via a kind of family psychodrama in apocalyptic form that they insist Dean (and Sam) join. Castiel at first insists on angelic destiny/fate, eventually breaks away from this belief system in favor of the concept of free will, only to call that freedom a length of rope to hang oneself with when he runs into the consequences of making his own decisions. But this is ultimately a digression: my main point is that the theme of free will versus destiny definitely has resonance with the three roles I’ve been discussing in this meta.

Dean’s downward spiral in season 5 is underlined in _My Bloody Valentine_ (5.14) when Famine pins Dean’s immunity to his effect on Dean’s increasing depression:

> FAMINE:That’s one deep, dark nothing you got there. I can see inside you, Dean. I can see how broken you are, how defeated. You can’t win, and you know it. But you just keep fighting. Just keep going through the motions. You’re not hungry, Dean, because inside, you’re already dead.

By the end of the episode, Sam is back in Bobby’s panic room detoxing from demon blood and Dean brushes off Castiel’s attempts at reassurance and heads to the scrapyard, where he begs for help. Help that isn’t coming, as he finds out in _Dark Side of the Moon_ (5.16).

Sent to heaven after being killed by two hunters, Dean and Sam are tasked by Castiel to try and talk to the angel Joshua, who is said to talk to God. Sam and Dean discover heaven is reliving supposedly happy memories, though one of Dean’s memories of comforting his mother after she fights with his father is a bittersweet reminder of emotional parentification; as Sam observes he “never realized how long [Dean’s] been cleaning up Dad’s messes.”

Dean is confronted by his absence from Sam’s happy memories, two of which directly involve Sam leaving the family. We’re once again reminded that Dean’s “one job” was a life or death one when Dean tells Sam that when Sam ran away, Dean thought he was dead. The consequences “when Dad got home…” go unspoken, but from the look on Dean’s face had to have been at least as serious as in _Something Wicked_ – and in this case from the evidence we have it appears John held Dean responsible for Sam’s actions, a pattern we saw hints of in the family interactions in season 1.

Whether manipulated by Zachariah or not, the themes of these memories directly play into Dean’s 90% Crap fears as established by YED back in season 1: You fight and you fight for this family, but the truth is they don’t need you. Not like you need them. A sentiment echoed by a “memory” of his mother that confirms every fear Dean has about his role in the family when he’s not serving as a tool: he’s 90% crap, existing to be left behind.

> MARY: **I never loved you. You were my burden. I was shackled to you. Look what it got me.** The worst was the smell. The pain, well. What can you say about your skin bubbling off? But the smell was so… You know, for a second I thought I’d left a pot roast burning in the oven. But… it was my meat. And then, finally, I was dead. **The one silver lining was that at least I was away from you**. Everybody leaves you, Dean. You noticed? Mommy. Daddy. Even Sam. You ever ask yourself why? **Maybe it’s not them. Maybe, it’s you.**

This passage exposes the core fear of a traumatized four year old, believing it must be his fault that his mother left him, his fault that she died. This comes shortly after the events of _The Song Remains the Same_ , where Dean found out that his mother was already pregnant with him, preventing her from leaving his father and in his mind losing the chance to save both herself and the world by preventing his and Sam’s existences. So this avatar of Mary speaks Dean’s fears aloud that it’s explicitly his fault that she died. His fault for existing at all.

In this passage Dean relives the visceral horror of Mary burning alive and then the image of her before death is tainted for him by confirming that he was, as he believes himself to be to everyone, nothing but a burden. As I said in the section on season 2, Dean’s lived reality was one of being left behind: his mother murdered, his father repeatedly abandoning him both physically and emotionally as a child before disappearing without a word as an adult, his brother – the only constant in his life – first running away as a child and then leaving for college. While Sam had every right to leave the family to go to school, Dean experienced this as abandonment, as the worst night of his life, because he was conditioned through John’s parentification to see Sam as “the most important thing” over and above himself. And as the shifter in _Skin_ alluded he also felt abandoned to a life alone with his father by the only other person who understood their world. None of this is Sam’s responsibility (instead, it’s the result of John’s abuse), but that doesn’t diminish the impact his leaving had on Dean. All of this is explicitly playing on Dean’s sense of himself as 90% Crap.

So by the time Sam and Dean find Joshua, Dean is desperate for help. But Joshua tells them that God’s message to them is to “back off”:

> JOSHUA: He knows what the angels are doing. He knows that the Apocalypse has begun. **He just doesn’t think it’s his problem.**  […]
> 
> DEAN: But he can stop it. He can stop all of it.
> 
> JOSHUA: I suppose he could, but he won’t….
> 
> DEAN: So he’s just going to sit back and watch the world burn?
> 
> JOSHUA: I know how important this was to you, Dean. I’m sorry.
> 
> DEAN: Forget it. **Just another dead-beat dad with a bunch of excuses, right. I’m used to that.** I’ll muddle through.
> 
> JOSHUA: Except… you don’t know if you can, this time. You can’t kill the Devil, and you’re losing faith, in yourself, your brother, and now this?

Dean links God’s refusal to help them with his own father’s abandonment of him, and Joshua is the mouthpiece of Dean’s increasing despair over what to do in face of the impending Apocalypse, given that as we saw in _Sam, Interrupted_ , he feels the weight of saving all those lives personally on his shoulders. Famine pointed out how Dean feels he’s going through the motions, fighting a battle he knows he can’t win, and in _Dark Side of the Moon_ Dean’s feeling that he’s in this alone is underlined by the repetitious plays on his sense of abandonment:

> DEAN: I mean, we’re supposed to be a team. It’s supposed to be you and me against the world, right?
> 
> SAM: Dean, it is!
> 
> DEAN: (after a pause) Is it?

Set aside for the moment the longer-term issues inherent to this construction of the relationship; the reality at that point in time is they aresupposed to be acting as a team against the overwhelming force of the impending apocalypse, because with the exceptions of Bobby and Castiel there is no one else. As we’ll see when Dean brings up some of the events of season 4 in the pivotal _Point of No Return_ (5.18), I believe Dean’s expression of the feeling that it’s no longer “you and me against the world” in this specific situation comes from the unresolved betrayal of the events of season 4. Sam lied to him extensively over the course of the year and from Dean’s perspective chose loyalty to Ruby over Dean himself when push came to shove – in a scene where after Dean lost a fist fight, Sam deliberately straddled and strangled him in a show of force.

That’s the unspoken abandonment that runs as a theme through the episode, culminating in Dean discarding the amulet Sam gave him as a child, and beyond. Dean wasn’t just reacting to the “memories” of Sam running away, Sam leaving for college; his interpretation of those memories was colored by much more recent events. The role his father and the angels pressed onto him aside, one of the reasons Dean feels like the weight of the fate of the world is solely on his shoulders is because of the rupture in his ability to trust Sam stemming from season 4.

Meanwhile Lucifer’s declaration while wearing his brother’s body in _The End_ (5.04) is still with him:

> LUCIFER: I know you won’t say yes to Michael, either. And I know you won’t kill Sam. **Whatever you do, you will always end up here. Whatever choices you make, whatever details you alter, we will always end up—here.** I win. So, I win.

Desperate to avoid that future, Dean consults a supposed prophet in the next episode, _99 Problems_ (5.17) looking for some sign of hope:

> LEAH : There’s gonna be a prize-fight. And…it’s gonna get bad. But after we win—and we will—the planet gets handed over to the chosen. And…it’s finally peaceful. No monsters, no disease, no death. You’re just…with the people you love.
> 
> DEAN: Of course, that’s if you can get past the velvet rope. Must be nice—being chosen.
> 
> LEAH: Well, Dean…you’re chosen… Must be hard. Being the Vessel of Heaven and having no hope.

Dean’s seen heaven, and while he might think it’s The Matrix, he’s also been to hell and knows viscerally that heaven’s preferable if there’s no way to avoid a choice between the two. Despair and apathy set in as the town that at first seemed like a positive inspiration of everyday people rallying against the Apocalypse starts turning against their own:

> SAM: At what point does this become too far for you? Stoning? Poisoned Kool-Aid? The angels are toying with these people!
> 
> DEAN: Angel world, angel rules, man.
> 
> SAM: And since when is that okay with you?
> 
> DEAN: **Since the angels’ got the only lifeboats on the Titanic. I mean, who exactly is supposed to come along and save these people? It was supposed to be us, but we can’t do it.**
> 
> SAM: So what? You wanna, you wanna just want to stop fighting, roll over?
> 
> DEAN: I don’t know, maybe.
> 
> SAM: Don’t say that.   
>   
> DEAN: Why not? 
> 
> SAM: Cause you can’t do this. 
> 
> DEAN: Actually, I can.   
>   
> SAM: No you can’t. **You can’t do this to me.**  I got one thing, one thing, keeping me going. You think you’re the only one white-knuckling it here, Dean? I can’t count on anyone else. I can’t do this alone. 

There’s a reason Dean leaves after this exchange, just as there’s a reason Sam underestimates the depths of Dean’s despair here and the lengths he’ll go to in the next episode. Given their upbringing, Sam too is used to Dean’s roles to the point where they’re often invisible to him. 

This episode is the turning point for Dean. He’s tried the Colt, he’s tried changing the past to change the future, he’s even tried God, but Lucifer and the demons seem to be winning every battle. At the end of _99 Problems_ the false prophet taunts him with a play on his 90% Crap doubts:

> LEAH: This is why my team’s gonna win. You’re the great vessel? **You’re pathetic, self-hating, and faithless.** It’s the end of the world. And you’re just gonna sit back and watch it happen.

This only reinforces the burden he’s put on himself and his feeling of failure. And then he succeeds at killing her, something only possible for a “servant of heaven.” What seems like the only solution to save as many people as he can is staring at him in the face. So at the end of the episode, Dean leaves to fulfill what he sees as the inevitable: say yes to Michael and become heaven’s weapon, let the roles his father set for him as a child finally obliterate him. A fate he accepts because he sees himself as 90% Crap, not a person, anyway.


	9. Chapter 9

POINT OF NO RETURN

After promising he’ll do what he can to protect Lisa and Ben – as we saw back in season 3, they represent to him the possibility of his own life away from his three roles – the next time we see Dean, at the start of _Point of No Return_ (5.18), he’s packing a cardboard box containing representations of his inheritance from his father: his leather jacket, the keys to the Impala, and his favorite gun. There’s a silent inversion here of _Dream a Little Dream_ , where instead of fighting for his personhood, Dean’s readying himself for oblivion. Though Dean’s promise of protection for Lisa and Ben might be a symbol that some part of him still has hope for himself, for some kind of life after the Apocalypse, the scene is clearly depicting a build up to an attempt at suicide, complete with suicide note.

Sam and Cas track Dean down before he can say Yes to Michael and confine him to Bobby’s house, where he lays out his desperate reasoning:

> DEAN: You know, **eight months of turned pages and screwed pooches** but tonight, tonight’s when the magic happens.
> 
> BOBBY:… What the hell happened to you?
> 
> DEAN: Reality happened. **Nuclear’s the only option** **we have left.** Michael can ice the devil, save a boatload of people.
> 
> BOBBY: But not all of them. We gotta think of something else.
> 
> DEAN: Yeah, well, that’s easy for you to say. **But if Lucifer burns this mother down, and I coulda done something about it, guess what? That’s on me.**

Here he uses the same term – nuclear – to talk about himself as he rejected for Sam back in _When the Levee Breaks_ , and again emphasizes his feeling of responsibility for saving everyone by laying it out directly. This is the only concrete option for salvation anyone has offered to date, and he sees them as having run out of time. Echoes of _Something Wicked_ , of _In My Time of Dying_ , of _What Is and What Should Never Be_ – if Dean doesn’t fill the role of weapon, whatever happens, whoever is harmed, it’ll be his fault. He’s expanded Save Sammy to Save Everyone but the dynamics are the same. From tool of use for protecting his family to tool of use by the angels to save heaven and earth.

After learning that their resurrected brother Adam is intended to fill Dean’s place as vessel, Dean again expresses his sense of personal responsibility over the Apocalypse and how it’s buttressed by feeling responsible for the deaths of everyone he loves, a statement of unresolved survivor’s guilt/trauma:

> DEAN: That kid’s not taking a bullet for me. I’m serious. I mean, **think about how many people we’ve gotten killed, Sam. Mom, Dad, Jess, Jo, Ellen.** Should I keep going?
> 
> SAM: It’s not like we pulled the trigger.

Then explicitly links the weight of those deaths with the role he feels he’s fated to fill:

> DEAN: We might as well have. I’m tired, man. **I’m tired of fighting who I’m supposed to be.**

What he’s supposed to be is a weapon. When Sam attempts to counter this reasoning, Dean isn’t just pushing his buttons to drive him away the way he did earlier with Bobby and Cas; he’s expressing the sense of betrayal that he’s carried since the events of season 4, illustrating how deeply they damaged his relationship with Sam and his ability to trust Sam:

> SAM: Well, do you think maybe you could take a half a second and stop trying to sacrifice yourself for a change? Maybe we could actually stick together?
> 
> DEAN: I don’t think so. I just…I—I don’t believe. In you. I mean, I don’t. I don’t know whether it’s gonna be demon blood or some other demon chick or what, but I do know they’re gonna find a way to turn you.
> 
> SAM: So you’re saying I’m not strong enough.
> 
> DEAN: You’re angry, you’re self-righteous. Lucifer’s gonna wear you to the prom, man. It’s just a matter of time.
> 
> SAM: Don’t say that to me. Not you…of all people.
> 
> DEAN: I don’t want to. But it’s the truth. And when Satan takes you over, there’s got to be somebody there to fight him, and it ain’t gonna be that kid. So, it’s got to be me.

So a big part of his feeling like he has to be the one to say Yes to Michael and serve as a weapon lies with the damage done in season 4, with his perception of Sam’s behavior. If Sam can lie to him as extensively as he did in season 4, if Sam can drink demon blood for power and throw his loyalty to Ruby rather than Dean, how can Dean expect him to resist Lucifer? This is a symptom that the trust, the relationship between Sam and Dean was never repaired after season 4 – there’s a reason why when Sam finds him at the beginning of the episode and says he has to stop Dean, Dean’s reply is to obliquely reference Sam’s beating and strangulation of him:

> DEAN: Just remember, you’re not all hopped up on demon blood this time.

To go into the complexities of why this relationship hasn’t been repaired is beyond the scope of this meta; but I think it’s sufficient to understand that from Dean’s POV the betrayals of season 4 are still influencing his actions here. His belief that he has to say Yes is also related to _The End_ and witnessing Lucifer in Sam’s body declaring that no matter what Dean does, this will happen – and then 8 months later, as Dean said, they are no closer to stopping that fate from happening, instead the Apocalypse is preceding like an avalanche.

Dean briefly escapes Bobby’s panic room and attempts to say Yes, only to be stopped by Castiel, who violently assaults him out of fury at Dean’s choice. Zachariah repeatedly used physical assault to punish Dean for his insubordinance and in an attempt to coerce him into saying Yes; Cas uses it to punish Dean out of a sense of personal betrayal and to prevent him from saying Yes. Two sides of the same coin – both reducing Dean to an object through violence to get what they want from him, which is to play a role for them:

> CASTIEL: I rebelled for this?! So that you could surrender to them? I gave everything for you. **And this is what you give to me.**

Cas’s violent reaction stems from his seeing Dean as filling the role of the reason Cas rebelled, when the reality was at the end of season 4 Dean asked for his help not for himself personally but for humanity, for what was the right thing to do:

> DEAN: You know what’s real? People, families – that’s real. And you’re gonna watch them all burn?…This is simple, Cas! No more crap about being a good soldier. There is a right and there is a wrong here, and you know it.

Cas made a free choice (free will!) to shift his loyalties from heaven to humanity, but pins all the responsibility for his choice onto Dean. And when Dean steps outside of this role Cas put him in and makes a choice Cas objects to, Cas literally beats him into the ground. So Dean might have been prevented from turning _himself_ into an object by saying Yes to Michael; but the way Cas chose to do so succeeds in reducing Dean to another kind of role. And whether or not Dean’s choice to say yes was a bad decision, Castiel’s motivations for stopping Dean and his doing so via using Dean’s body as a vehicle to release his rage (when he could just as easily have put Dean to sleep and transported him back to Bobby’s, as he does after the beating) only reinforces the sense that Dean’s worth to everyone is as an object, a tool, what he can do for them, what role he must fill.

Which contrasts starkly with how Sam treats Dean at the end of the episode: as a person with autonomy rather than an object or tool. And ultimately that’s what reaches him:

> SAM: We can’t do it alone. And uh, you’re pretty much the only game in town.
> 
> DEAN: Isn’t that a bad idea?
> 
> SAM: Cas and Bobby think so. I’m not so sure.
> 
> DEAN: Well, they’re right. Because either it’s a trap to get me there to make me say yes, or it’s not a trap and I’m gonna say yes anyway. And I will. I’ll do it. Fair warning.
> 
> SAM: No, you won’t. When push shoves, you’ll make the right call.

And while Dean at first seems like he’ll follow through and say Yes, Sam treating him like a valued person rather than a weapon or an object, Sam respecting Dean’s agency, gives him the space and smidgen of hope to reject those roles:

> SAM: I saw your eyes. You were totally rockin’ the “yes” back there. So, what changed your mind?
> 
> DEAN: Honestly? The damnedest thing. I mean, the world’s ending. The walls are coming down on us, and I look over to you and all I can think about is, “this stupid son of a bitch brought me here.” I just didn’t want to let you down.

And significantly, being valued as a person by his brother, as more than 90% Crap, leads Dean to connect his rejection of the Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument role with introspection about and ultimately a rejection of the Save Sammy role:

> DEAN: I owe you an apology. … I don’t know if it’s being a big brother or what, but to me, you’ve always been this snot-nosed kid that I’ve had to keep on the straight and narrow. I think we both know that that’s not you anymore. I mean, hell, if you’re grown-up enough to find faith in me…the least I can do is return the favor. So screw destiny, right in the face. I say we take the fight to them, and do it our way.

By the end of the season, Saving People will require Dean give up on Saving Sam by giving his consent to Sam’s plan to say Yes to Lucifer and trap him in the cage in hell. There’s also no place in the plan for Dean’s role as weapon or tool. So what does that leave him?

At first glance I’d say that at the climax of _Swan Song_ (5.22) Dean shows up outside of his roles – he’s ostensibly given up on Save Sammy by consenting to Sam’s plan, he has no chance or intention to serve as Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument given a battle between two archangels – and Adam has replaced him as the Michael Sword/Vessel. Dean tells Bobby that he’s going to Stull Cemetery because he’s not going to let his brother die alone, but I think what happens is much more complex and does end up engaging two of his roles.

Ultimately he’s not there with the intention of saving Sam’s life, or saving Sam from hell; but given that Sam was almost immediately overpowered by Lucifer after saying Yes, Dean’s intervention at Apocalypse Ground Zero ends up saving Sam’s _plan_. As [veneredirimmel](http://tmblr.co/mIsW_in3ClvI216xFDYoTaw) pointed out to me, Dean ends up serving as “an object of salvation (of Sam’s redemption).” Which I think you could, in the context of what I’ve laid out in this discussion, see as a form of Save Sammy, given that earlier in season 5 we saw that role transform into something broader for him – Save Everyone. By showing up at Stull, by intervening between Lucifer and Michael, Dean triggers Sam’s ability to overcome Lucifer long enough for Sam to pull Lucifer and Michael into the cage. And ultimately this does end up preventing the Apocalypse, saving heaven and earth, and I think you could argue that by intervening, Dean Saves Sam from Lucifer’s ultimate control, by helping him regain his autonomy.

And how does Dean accomplish this? I debated about including this in the category of 90% Crap, because I do think a big part of what happened at the end of _Swan Song_ involved Dean’s wish to be fully present as a person with his brother at the end of the world because of his love for Sam rather than any obligations or roles; but the reality is that ultimately Dean only reaches his brother after withstanding a violent physical assault. Lucifer beats Dean to the point he’s nearly unrecognizable before Sam manages to retake control of his body, while Dean tells him Sam, _it’s okay. It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here. I’m not gonna leave you. I’m not gonna leave you._

Maybe for a character with less of a track record for not seeing himself as a full person whose life is worth anything, this wouldn’t necessarily fit into the roles I’ve been discussing in this meta; but with Dean – actively suicidal only a few episodes ago – it’s hard not to see it at least partially through that lens. I’m not so sure the 90% Crap role can be so easily separated out in these circumstances, despite thinking Dean’s initial presence at Stull was an act of full agency.

Even as it serves as the impetus for Sam to retake control, that it takes the sacrifice of Dean’s body to do so is extremely disturbing, especially given how many times in the past we’ve seen Dean assaulted in some way through the bodies of family members – YED!John, YED!Samuel, Lucifer!Sam, Meg!Sam – and trusted friends like Demon!Bobby. Factor in the vicious beating only a few episodes prior to this by Castiel – while under his own power and control, taking out his rage on Dean’s body – and a pattern starts to emerge. A pattern that carries a disturbing subtext in a narrative that repeatedly explores the dynamics of familial abuse.

> LUCIFER!SAM: You know, I tried to be nice for Sammy’s sake. But you are such a pain in my ass.[…] Oh, he’s in here, all right. And he’s gonna feel the snap of your bones. Every single one. We’re gonna take our time.

Notice the similarity between these lines and YED’s lines about John tasting the iron in Dean’s blood back in _Devil’s Trap_. Repeatedly in canon, Dean’s body becomes the sacrifice that returns one of his loved ones to themselves – a role no other character has played thus far, it should be noted. Dean’s body is the tool by which his possessed or controlled loved ones regain control over themselves even as Dean’s body also serves as an object for the possessing/controlling force – demons and angels – to work out their rage at his attempts to thwart their plans. We see this dynamic with YED, we see it with Meg when she was possessing Sam in season 2, we see it with Lucifer and later when Naomi was controlling Castiel in season 8. Dean’s body stands in their way, a thing that must be physically destroyed, even if it wasn’t Dean’s intention to sacrifice himself. Over and over again we see antagonists express their rage through violence inflicted on Dean’s body – including Alastair in _On the Head of a Pin_ and Zachariah in _Dark Side of the Moon_.

So ultimately for me while Sam is able to break through Lucifer’s control via memories of his relationship with Dean-the-person rather than Dean filling any of his roles, this was only triggered after Lucifer – in Sam’s body – nearly beat Dean to death, using Dean as an object to release his rage. I think it’s safe to say given the discussion above that in _Swan Song_ , though Dean doesn’t show up at Stull with the intention of filling any of his roles, that wasn’t the end result. Even when his intentions are contrary to those roles he ends up forced into playing them – Save Sammy/Save Everyone and 90% Crap predominating here. And I think this complexity is reflected in Chuck’s narration at the end:

> CHUCK: Dean didn’t want Cas to save him. Every part of him, every fiber he’s got, wants to die, or find a way to bring Sam back. But he isn’t gonna do either. Because he made a promise.

Before he said Yes to Lucifer, Sam asked Dean to let go of his roles, to be a person:

> SAM: You go find Lisa. You pray to god she’s dumb enough to take you in, and you – you have barbecues and go to football games. You go live some normal, apple-pie life, Dean. Promise me.

And at the close of the episode, Dean leaves Bobby (and everything Bobby’s represents of the hunting life) behind and shows up once again on Lisa’s doorstep and is invited to stay.


	10. Chapter 10

SEASON 6

At the start of season 6 we meet a Dean adjusting to living outside of his assigned roles, forming a life with Lisa and Ben, who treat him not as a tool but as a full person. In _Exile on Main Street_ (6.01) we’re shown that Dean struggles to let go of his Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument (Hunting Things) and his Save Sam (Saving People/Family) roles, but importantly these struggles seem to intensify only _after_ he’s already been dosed with the djinn’s poison the first time.

In the context of this meta it’s telling to me that the hallucinations Dean has when attacked with a full dose from the djinn center around the YED, original source of his childhood trauma, instigator of the events that led to John forcing him into these roles. His hallucinations are a re-living of his core trauma, with Lisa in his mother’s position and Ben in Sam’s while he’s helpless to stop it. This triggers an acute trauma reaction: first Dean bundles Lisa and Ben up and takes them to Bobby’s, halfway across the country. Then by _Two and a Half Men_ (6.02) Dean has had them move households from Indiana to Michigan.

In that episode we see Dean very conscious of repeating some of his father’s behaviors, but with an important difference: one of the triggers for his acting “like his father” is the thought of Ben with a gun in his hands, exactly the opposite of what his father did for him. Dean’s impulse was to protect Ben from Dean’s own experience, prevent Ben from filling that role of Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument, though he lacked the tools to do so in a constructive manner, yelling at Ben.

At the end of 6.01 Dean turns down Sam’s offer to take back his role as Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument (and also Save Sammy, given he already senses there’s something off about Sam) instead returning to his life with Lisa and Ben, a choice he’ll later see as having endangered them. Sam coerces him back into his hunting role in 6.02 by threatening to show up at his door if Dean doesn’t agree to help him. In this episode Dean is reunited with the spectre of his family history of hunting via the Campbell clan, and further evidence that there’s something very off about his brother, all reinforcing old roles. At the end of the episode Lisa suggests a compromise between hunting and his life with her and Ben. However this arrangement falls apart before it really starts due to the events of _Live Free and Twihard_ (6.05).

This episode is the clearest example since _On the Head of a Pin_ of the link between violent sexual objectification and Dean’s being reduced to a tool of use to another person. In this case, he’s made into a tool twice over: Sam sees him as a pragmatic way to infiltrate a vampire lair in the hunt for the Alpha vampire, and the vampire who turns Dean sees Dean as a tool to be used in the “recruitment” of more vampires.

While tracking down a suspected vampire, Dean is approached in an alley in an explicitly sexualized way – one that Dean directly counters – by Boris, the ringleader of the local lair:

> BORIS: You’re pretty.
> 
> DEAN: I’m sorry?
> 
> BORIS: I said…you’re pretty.
> 
> DEAN: Yeah, sorry again, pal. I don’t play for your team.

After Dean’s rejection, Boris the vampire violently assaults him to the point where Dean is dazed, his vision blurry. We see Sam arrive at the entrance to the alley as Boris continues his assault. At first it seems like Sam will intervene, rescuing his brother from attack; instead he intentionally pauses and watches as if to see what is going to happen. By this point Dean is incapacitated to the point of being unable to fight back, nearly unconscious. Sam watches as Boris cuts open his own wrist and smears his blood over Dean’s mouth in a scene heavily suggestive of a sexual assault given the way Boris’s lines before he attacked echoed street harassment.

Only after this happens does Sam step in, and Boris escapes while Dean crumples to the ground. Once back at their motel room Dean starts showing the signs of the heightened sensory overload of the newly turned vampire – which also happens to look very like the hypervigilance of an acute trauma reaction. With his enhanced senses, Dean is able to tell that Sam’s heartbeat hasn’t changed, that his demeanor isn’t consistent with what Dean expects from him given the situation. Dean sees himself now as a monster that needs to be killed, and expects his grandfather to do the job. So he decides to say goodbye to Lisa.  

He shows up unexpectedly in Lisa’s bedroom (openly noting the creepiness of doing so), visibly struggling not to succumb to the vampire’s hunger and freaking her out. His words to her are pure 90% Crap, conflating being turned into a monster against his will with himself-as-a-person, because he believes there’s no difference:

> DEAN: Lisa, I can’t bring **this crap** home to you.
> 
> LISA: You’re talking about your work?
> 
> DEAN: **I’m talking about my LIFE** **.** It’s ugly…and it’s violent…and I’m gonna die, soon.

By the time Samuel arrives, Dean has returned to the motel room. When Samuel suggests he possesses a cure that can reverse Dean’s vampirism, Sam’s reaction comes just a beat too late to be genuine surprise. Turns out Dean needs the blood of the vampire who turned him for the cure – conveniently requiring he infiltrate the vampire nest in a way that allows him to go ‘undercover’ as one of them. After Dean leaves, Samuel confronts Sam:

> SAMUEL. What the hell’s wrong with you, Sam? You knew about the cure!
> 
> SAM. What? No, I didn’t.
> 
> SAMUEL. But we talked about it MONTHS ago.
> 
> SAM. Not me. Must’ve been Christian or something.
> 
> SAMUEL. Huh. That’s strange, cuz if you HAD known, it’d be almost like you LET him get turned. Get a man on the inside? Help us find that alpha vamp we’ve been looking for?
> 
> SAM. Are you serious? You think I’d do something like that, risk my own brother? What’s wrong with YOU? Look, I’m just relieved we can fix him.

As deftly as he deflects here, we’ll see that Sam’s interest lies solely with what Dean can find out from the nest. And what Dean does discover is a system of recruitment that parallels aspects of human trafficking:

> BORIS. These stupid little brats are so horny they’ve reinvented us as Prince Charming with a Volvo. They want a promise ring with fangs, so I give it to ‘em. **You – you go out and you get them, and you bring 'em home to ME.**
> 
> DEAN. So what’s with the cages?
> 
> BORIS. Oh, that’s just, y'know… **till they’re compliant**. Eventually these girls will go out, and they’ll fetch me boys like YOU, and around and around we go…

As Boris explains, Dean is a tool to him, a tool to be used to recruit more potential vampires. The turned vampires – themselves victims – are sent out to seduce new victims, in a system built on a framework of sexualized coercion and deception.

> DEAN. Gotta say, I’m impressed. This whole system, it’s…it’s all you?
> 
> BORIS. No, no, no, no….I just…implement, y'know? Make sure you all fall in line. It’s HIS…our father’s…
> 
> DEAN. Your father’s?
> 
> BORIS. Aren’t you the curious one?
> 
> DEAN. Oh, you don’t know the half of it.
> 
> BORIS. In due time. You… **you want the** **private tour** , don’t you?
> 
> DEAN. Thought you’d never ask.

This is another scene that heavily depends on the blocking and body language to fully convey, but when Boris offers the “private tour” he’s clearly sexually objectifying Dean. Who he’d just violently attacked in an alley after calling him “pretty” and forcefully “recruited” into his scheme, where victims are kept in cages and “addicted” to human blood until they’re “compliant.”

Dean eventually acquires Boris’s blood and escapes the lair, but only after an intensely violent sequence where he’s forced to take on the entire nest himself, armed only with a machete. In one of the more disturbing scenes in the show, Sam and Samuel find Dean covered in blood among the carnage, sitting with his foot planted on Boris’s decapitated head and staring up at them with dead eyes rather than any sense of triumph. This slaughter was clearly a matter of survival for Dean after he was identified as an interloper in the nest, but the proximity to Boris’s sexualized menace towards Dean paired with Boris literally weaponizing Dean by turning him into a vampire and Sam’s utilization of Dean as a tool is an important combination we’ll come back to in the discussion of season 9 and the First Blade.

While Samuel tells Dean the cure is going to be difficult, Sam eagerly asks Dean about what he saw in the nest. Something Dean can’t answer until after the cure finishes with him – but while the cure is working through him he relives the attack in the alley in reverse, witnessing what he was too out of it to see at the time – Sam watching him get turned instead of intervening. The next morning as Dean emerges from the bathroom still clearly affected by his experience, again the first thing Sam wants to know is what he saw in the lair. Sam repeatedly emphasizes how Dean could be used as a tool to gather intel in the Campbell family search for Alphas, rather than how the experience might have had an impact on Dean as a person, proving Samuel’s suspicions of his motivations well founded. Of course what Dean doesn’t know yet is that Sam is missing his soul; all Dean is aware of at the time is that his brother apparently deliberately let him get turned into a monster for strategic reasons with no care for the risk or consequences to Dean or anyone else.

_They don’t need you like you need them._

_On the Head of a Pin_ and _Live Free and Twihard_ are not the only examples of unwanted sexualized objectification of or menace to Dean paired with the theme of Dean as object. As I’ve suggested, this is an ongoing theme.

As early as _Dead Man’s Blood_ (1.20) Dean is dangled bodily as bait to trap a vampire, and after he makes a joke about necrophilia, the vampire in question both physically and sexually assaults him. As we see in similar situations, Dean tries to brush it off with a joke that still acknowledges the sexualized objectification going on:

> DEAN: I don’t usually get this friendly until the second date but…

Dean uses his body as a tool in service of helping his father get ahold of the Colt, and this is paired with sexualized assault.

In _Caged Heat_ _(_ 6.10) Meg links nonconsensual sexualized objectification of Dean while he’s her prisoner with an intent to torture him for information on Crowley:

> MEG: Well, here I am, **big boy**. So, what should we do now?
> 
> DEAN: How about I rip you to shreds?
> 
> MEG: **Kinky, I like** **.** A little Q &A first, if you don’t mind. Now, where’s your boss?… [ **straddles Dean’s lap** ] Where’s he take all those things you snatch up for him? I bet you an all-day sucker that’s where his majesty’s holed up. [When Dean doesn’t answer, she holds a knife to his throat.] OK, **officially over the foreplay**. Satisfy me, or I please myself!

Here Meg takes the traditional threat of torture for information and sexualizes it. She directly pairs a reference to Dean’s “apprenticeship” with Alastair in hell with more assault and innuendo.

> MEG: **I apprenticed under Alastair in Hell just like your brother.** So Dean, can I make Crowley do whatever I want?
> 
> DEAN: Yeah, she can.
> 
> MEG: It’s a deal then. Hugs and puppies all around!
> 
> DEAN: You gonna untie us?
> 
> MEG: Please. **Don’t pretend you don’t enjoy it.**
> 
> [She turns to leave. One of her companions walks up to Dean, staring intently at him.]
> 
> DEAN: **You gonna kiss me?**

And Dean, as he did with the vampire in _Dead Man’s Blood_ , as he often does in this kind of scene, attempts to brush off and take control of the sexualized threat head on, identifying it for what it is. Meg wants something from Dean. She reduces him to an object both through unwanted sexual attention and the threat of torture in her attempts to use him as a tool in her hunt for Crowley.

Just as the crossroads demon did with her line “needy guys are such a turnoff,” Alastair with his song lyrics “dancing cheek to cheek,” and Boris by offering Dean the “private tour,” Meg positions Dean as if he’s the willing partner in her sexual objectification of him. As if he’s the one suggesting the relationship is a sexual/romantic one. In all of these situations, the aggressors illustrate Elaine Scarry’s line about a mime of choice and consent in their sexualization of their interactions with Dean in order to exert threat and power over him while attempting to make him complicit in their actions at the same time.

The patterns of how these roles play out in the rest of season 6 should be quite obvious by now. Dean, in his role of Save Sammy, risks literal death to negotiate with Death to return Sam’s soul in _Appointment in Samarra_ (6.11). Dean makes himself into a weapon to kill Eve in _Mommy Dearest_ (6.19) by swallowing the phoenix ashes and goading Eve into biting him. In _Let it Bleed_ (6.21) Saving People becomes saving Lisa and Ben from Crowley, and to do so Dean turns to the most extreme form of his Daddy’s Blunt Little Instrument role where Killing Things becomes torturing demons for information and discarding the dead vessels – something that ultimately fails to gain him any helpful information.

Then during the rescue attempt, under horrific circumstances and against his previous resolve, Dean ends up forcing Ben into a “blunt instrument” role similar to the one that his father forced onto him, a re-enactment of his father’s behavior that Dean had earlier in the season expressed fears of to Lisa. Which I believe had everything to do with what he did next: after Castiel heals Lisa from a fatal wound, Dean asks him to erase Dean from Lisa and Ben’s memories, an act that explicitly robs them of their agency and foreshadows his actions in 9.01. It’s also a consequence of Dean’s perception of himself as 90% Crap: he failed to save them, his use of torture got him nowhere and did nothing but remind himself why he didn’t deserve to have a life outside of his roles in the first place, and he ended up with Lisa dying and Ben traumatized. As Dean sees it he’s the car crash in the substitute memory Castiel has given them:

> DEAN: **I’m the guy who hit you** … I just, uh, I **lost control for a minute** , and I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I’m real happy you two are both okay. And uh, I’m just - **I’m glad your life can get back to normal now.**

What he’s expressing here is that he “lost control” by allowing himself to want a life with Lisa and Ben, free of his traditional roles, for allowing himself to see himself as a person with needs, as when he protested back in _Two and a Half Men_ that he couldn’t lose them to the hunting life. He lost control and forced Ben into Dean’s own childhood role, one Dean clearly viewed as something to avoid at all costs even if he appears to have never articulated it to himself as abusive. He lost control and wanted things for himself and allowed himself to try for more, therefore they were harmed. It’s inevitable – as he said to Ben in _Mannequin 3_ (6.13):

> DEAN Just 'cause you love someone doesn’t mean you should stick around and screw up their life. So I can’t be here.
> 
> BEN You think something will follow you home?
> 
> DEAN No. No, I don’t, but I think my job turns me into somebody that can’t sit at your dinner table. And if I stayed, you’d end up just like me.
> 
> BEN Why do you say it like you’re so…bad?
> 
> DEAN Well, trust me, I’m not someone you want to aim to be.
> 
> BEN Don’t I get a vote?
> 
> DEAN No, you don’t. I’m sorry, Ben. But, you see, this way you got a shot at living whatever life you want. You know, pick one. Pick five. 'cause with me, there’s just the one road.

Dean sees everything he warned Ben here as having come true in _Let it Bleed_ , and believes this all has happened as a direct result of him expressing and acting on his own needs. 

As he says to Veritas in  _You Can’t Handle the Truth_ (6.06):

> DEAN: I thought [Sam] was a monster. But now I think…
> 
> VERITAS: Now you think what?
> 
> DEAN: He’s just acting like me.
> 
> VERITAS: What do you mean?
> 
> DEAN: It’s the gig. You’re covered in blood until you’re covered in your own blood. Half the time, you’re about to die. Like right now. I told myself I wanted out… that I wanted a family.
> 
> VERITAS: But you were lying.
> 
> DEAN: No. But what I’m good at… is slicing throats. I ain’t a father. I’m a killer. And there’s no changing that. I know that now.

After turning to torture and treating Ben the way his father treated him in _Let it Bleed_  as well as being turned into a literal monster in _Live Free and Twihard_ , Dean no longer only fears that he’ll eventually become a monster, his fears have manifested: he’s actually been one now. He believes there’s nothing else for him.

So without him, Lisa and Ben can get back to normal and avoid his fate, because he’s 90% Crap.


End file.
